Article 43 of the 1907 Hague IV convention on “Laws and Customs of War on Land” states that “[t]he authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” Article 55 states, “The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct.” Most legal experts interpret these provisions to mean that an occupying military power cannot change the laws of a country it occupies. [Hague Convention IV, 10/18/1907; Whyte, 3/2007, pp. 181]

In a television interview, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney explains why the US did not push on to Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War: “If we’d gone to Baghdad we would’ve been all alone, there wouldn’t have been anyone else with us, it would’ve been a US occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq. Once you… took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off.… It’s a quagmire if you go that far.… The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families it wasn’t a cheap war. The question for the president in terms of whether we went on to Baghdad… was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? In our judgment, it was not very many and I think we got it right.” [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/26/2007]

Blackwater logo. [Source: Blackwater]In June 1997, three months after having been discharged from active duty, ex-Navy Seal Erik Prince incorporates the Blackwater Training Center. He purchases more than 4000 acres in Currituck County, North Carolina, for $756,000, and nearly one thousand acres in Camden County for $616,000. The new compound is built near the Great Dismal Swamp. The stated idea behind Blackwater was “to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training.” In May 1998, Blackwater opens for business. It is suggested that the early years of Blackwater are slow going, but the volume of secret contracts makes that difficult to verify. [Scahill, 3/1/2007]

Victoria “Torie” Clarke joins the Defense Department. She is a public relations specialist who served as press secretary for President George H. W. Bush’s 1992 re-election campaign, worked closely with Senator John McCain (R-AZ), and was an Assistant US Trade Representative during the first Bush’s presidency. In the private sector, she was president of Bozell Eskew Advertising, Vice President of the National Cable Telecommunications Association, and the Washington director for the PR firm of Hill & Knowlton, the firm so heavily involved in promoting and selling the 1991 Gulf War (see January 16, 1991 and After). She brings strong ideas to her new position about achieving what she calls “information dominance” in both the domestic and foreign “markets” (see February 2003). She directs what John Stauber, the executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, calls the “twin towers of propaganda” for the Pentagon: “embedding news media with the troops, and embedding military propagandists into the TV media” (see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond). [Stennis Center for Public Service, 8/17/2007; New York Times, 4/20/2008; Bill Berkowitz, 5/10/2008]

As the United States and its allies ready themselves for war with Iraq, numerous press reports say that the US military may use newly-developed “directed energy” weapons during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Directed energy weapons (DEW) are based on laser technology. The most advanced DEW and most likely to be actually deployed is a high-powered microwave (HPM) used to destroy enemy electronics by releasing an electro-magnectic pulse or EMP, akin to an electric surge caused by lightning. The danger of an electro-magnetic pulse was first realized in the 1960s during nuclear weapons research. A nuclear explosion can release enough radiation to “fry” electronic equipment. The US and Soviet militaries are known to have devoted considerable efforts to harden their equipment against such damage. Since the 1980s, the United States has also researched the use of a high-powered microwave as an offensive weapon to disable enemy communications, electric, and computing equipment. Such research has taken place primarily at Kirtland Air Force Base, in New Mexico, under the purview of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate. The Kirtland center has about 600 employees and a 120 million dollars annual budget. US companies such as TRW, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also involved in the field. [Economist, 1/30/2003; Reuters, 2/2/2003; New York Times, 2/20/2003; Associated Press, 3/19/2003]

The “military analysts” named by the New York Times as participants in the Pentagon’s propaganda operation to manipulate public opinion on the Iraq war (see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond) appear over 4,500 times on network and television news broadcasts between January 1, 2002 and May 13, 2008. The news outlets included in the May 13, 2008 count, performed by the media watchdog group Media Matters, includes ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR. Media Matters uses the Lexis/Nexis database to compile their report. Media Matters releases a spreadsheet documenting each analyst’s appearance on each particular broadcast outlet. [Media Matters, 5/13/2008] Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald notes, “If anything, the Media Matters study actually under-counts the appearances, since it only counted ‘the analysts named in the Times article,’ and several of the analysts who were most active in the Pentagon’s propaganda program weren’t mentioned by name in that article.” [Salon, 5/15/2008]

An aerial photo of the Khurmal training camp, actually in the nearby village of Sargat. This image was shown during Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003. [Source: Public domain, via National Security Archive]US intelligence determines that Islamist militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has recently moved to a part of northern Iraq controlled by Kurdish rebels, and his militant group has set up a chemical weapons lab there. The lab, located near the town of Khurmal, allegedly produces ricin and cyanide. [MSNBC, 3/2/2004] By early 2002, al-Zarqawi had been identified as a significant terrorist target, based on intelligence that he ran an important training camp in Afghanistan (see Early 2000-December 2001) and had already unsuccessfully attempted plots against Israeli and European targets. CIA intelligence indicates al-Zarqawi is in the camp, along with many al-Qaeda fighters who had recently fled from US air strikes in Afghanistan. Additionally, there are preparations and training in the camp for new attacks on Western interests. [Wall Street Journal, 10/25/2004] The US military draws up plans to attack the site with cruise missiles, and the plans are sent to the White House. However, NBC News will later report that, “according to US government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.” [MSNBC, 3/2/2004] Officials involved in the planning expect a swift decision, but are surprised when weeks go by without any response from the White House. Finally, information is somehow leaked to the media in Turkey that the US is considering targeting the camp, and intelligence shows that al-Zarqawi and his group flee the camp soon thereafter. [Wall Street Journal, 10/25/2004]

The area controlled by Ansar al-Islam in 2002 is marked in orange. Two of the group’s camps, Sargat and Biyara, are both near the town of Khurmal. [Source: Adam Weiskind / Christian Science Monitor (slightly modified)]Beginning in early 2002, some Islamist militants fleeing from the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan settle in parts of Iraq controlled by Kurdish rebels. According to an informant, around the middle of 2002, militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi holds a meeting somewhere in Iraq with Mullah Krekar, head of the Ansar al-Islam militant group. This group controls a very small region of Kurdish Iraq near the Iranian border. Krekar and al-Zarqawi agree to work closely together, and they plan to equip some militants to carry out attacks against US targets in Jordan and in Iraq once the US invades Iraq. [Bergen, 2006, pp. 362] Al-Zarqawi moves to the area controlled by Ansar al-Islam a short time later (see December 2001-Mid-2002).

Jeff Cohen. [Source: Jeff Cohen]Jeff Cohen, the founder of the media watchdog organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and a former producer for MSNBC talk show host Phil Donahue, loses almost all of his airtime on the network as the Iraq invasion approaches. Cohen, once a frequent guest on MSNBC’s various opinion and commentary shows, will reflect in his 2006 book Cable News Confidential that he argued passionately against invading Iraq, using “every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers—no real threat, cost, instability.” However, as the run-up to war progresses, he is no longer allowed on the air. He will write: “There was no room for me after MSNBC launched ‘Countdown: Iraq’—a daily one-hour show that seemed more keen on glamorizing a potential war than scrutinizing or debating it. ‘Countdown: Iraq’ featured retired colonels and generals, sometimes resembling boys with war toys as they used props, maps and glitzy graphics to spin invasion scenarios. They reminded me of pumped-up ex-football players doing pre-game analysis and diagramming plays. It was excruciating to be sidelined at MSNBC, watching so many non-debates in which myth and misinformation were served up unchallenged.” In 2008, Cohen will write: “It was bad enough to be silenced. Much worse to see that these ex-generals—many working for military corporations—were never in debates, nor asked a tough question by an anchor.” Cohen’s recollections will be bolstered by a 2008 New York Times investigation that documents a systematic, well-organized media manipulation program by the Pentagon that successfully sells the war to the media and the American public by using so-called “independent military analysts” (see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond). While the Times article focuses primarily on the analysts and their Pentagon handlers, Cohen says that an equal portion of blame belongs to the media outlets themselves. “The biggest villain here is not Rumsfeld nor the Pentagon,” Cohen writes. “It’s the TV networks. In the land of the First Amendment, it was their choice to shut down debate and journalism. No government agency forced MSNBC to repeatedly feature the hawkish generals unopposed. Or fire Phil Donahue. Or smear weapons expert Scott Ritter. Or blacklist former attorney general Ramsey Clark. It was top NBC/MSNBC execs, not the Feds, who imposed a quota system on the Donahue staff requiring two pro-war guests if we booked one anti-war advocate—affirmative action for hawks.… [T]he major TV networks… were not hoodwinked by a Pentagon propaganda scheme. They were willingly complicit, and have been for decades.” [Truthout (.org), 4/28/2008]

Shabbir Khan, an executive for the Saudi conglomerate Tamimi Global Co, throws a lavish birthday party for KBR procurement manager Stephen Seamans at a Tamimi “party house” near Camp Arifjan, a Kuwaiti base near the border. Khan gives Seamans the use of a prostitute as one of his birthday presents. Driving Seamans back home, Khan offers Seamans $130,000 in kickbacks. Five days after the party, with Seamans and Khan driving the deal, KBR awards Tamimi a $14.4 million mess hall subcontract for the upcoming invasion of Iraq. This and other information about KBR war profiteering in Iraq comes from a federal investigation that will begin in late 2007 (see October 2006 and Beyond). [Chicago Tribune, 2/20/2008; Chicago Tribune, 2/21/2008]

US intelligence concludes that Islamist militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is planning to use ricin in attacks on civilians in Europe. Several months earlier, the US had determined the location of his main training camp and chemical weapons lab, located in a part of northern Iraq controlled by Kurdish rebels, and decided against attacking it with cruise missiles (see June 2002). [MSNBC, 3/2/2004] By this time, al-Zarqawi is known to have masterminded the assassination of a senior American diplomat in Jordan the month before. Al-Zarqawi had his group had fled the camp several months before, but new intelligence indicates that he has reoccupied it. At the time, he is using a satellite telephone, and intercepts of his communications show that he is frequently calling from within the camp. [Wall Street Journal, 10/25/2004] In light of the new intelligence, the US military draws up a second attack plan on the camp, but the White House again decides against it. Former National Security Council member Roger Cressey will later claim, “People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists.” [MSNBC, 3/2/2004]

Neoconservative Michael Ledeen recommends that the US invade Iraq—but only after invading Iran and overthrowing that nation’s government. Ledeen claims that the sporadic demonstrations by Iranian dissidents prove that the entire nation is just waiting for someone like the US to come in and get rid of the theocratic Iranian “mullahcracy” and replace it with a Western-style democracy. Ledeen writes: “This is yet another test of the courage and coherence of American leaders. President Bush has been outstanding in endorsing the calls for freedom in Iran, as has Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. It would be nice if Secretary of State Powell added his own eloquence to the chorus, especially because many Iranians fear that the State Department is still trying to cut a deal with the mullahs. I have long argued that it would be better to liberate Iran before Iraq, and events may soon give us that opportunity. Let’s hope our national security team recognizes how wonderful an opportunity it is, and therefore gives the Iranian freedom fighters the assistance they so richly deserve. Faster, please. Opportunity is knocking at our door.” [National Review, 11/12/2002]

After the US invades Iraq (see March 19, 2003), the US Department of Defense begins drastically curbing its oversight of private contractors providing logistical support to US troops, while at the same time ramping up its outsourcing of critical troop support jobs. The prime beneficiary of the Defense Department’s decisions is former Halliburton subsidiary KBR. While Army contracts will quadruple from $23.3 billion in 1992 to $100.6 billion in 2006, the Army halves its number of contract supervisors, from 10,000 in 1990 to 5,500 in 2007. As a result, fraud runs rampant (see October 2006 and Beyond). Subcontractor Christopher Cahill, whose company has spent a decade working under the LOGCAP logistics program, will say: “I think we downsized past the point of general competency. The point of a standing army is to have them equipped.” Cahill will serve 30 months in prison for fraud. A KBR spokeswoman will say, “Ethics and integrity are core values for KBR.” Monitoring - Military auditors claim they closely monitor the various layers of KBR subcontractors who actually perform most of the LOGCAP work, but prosecutors will show that US-based auditors can manage reviews that are limited at best over the plethora of deals constantly being brokered between KBR and a host of multinational subcontractors. One of KBR’s Houston office buildings houses a 25-member team from the Defense Contract Audit Agency; in 2007 they will admit that they cannot perform any oversight because they have “no communications” with any “personnel on the ground” in Iraq or Kuwait. Consequences - Without oversight, many KBR officials begin openly displaying and bragging about the Rolex watches, leather jackets, prostitutes, and other “perks” provided to them by Middle Eastern businessmen. “[T]he KBR guys weren’t shy about bragging about the fact that they were being treated to all that stuff,” according to Paul Morrell, whose firm the Event Source ran several mess halls as a KBR subcontractor. In return, subcontractors become indispensable to the logistical functioning of the Army, and throw their weight around. Former KBR subcontract manager Harry DeWolf will say that when subcontracts came up for renegotiation, the firms would say: “‘Fine, we’re going to pull out all of our people and equipment.’ They really had KBR and the government over the barrel.” [Chicago Tribune, 2/20/2008; Chicago Tribune, 2/21/2008]

Ahmad al Mukhtar is appointed as director of foreign relations in Iraq’s Ministry of Trade. One of his tasks will be to push for Iraq’s inclusion into the World Trade Organization. Al Mukhtar, who has no background in economics and whose previous job was reading the English-language news on television, shares Washington’s view that Iraq needs a market-based economy and that Iraqis need to be weaned from their dependence on the state. According to Al Mukhtar, Iraqis “are lazy. The Iraqis by nature, they are very dependent…. They will have to depend on themselves, it is the only way to survive in the world today.” [Harper's, 9/24/2004]

The US State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs awards DynCorp International a sole-sourced (no competitive bidding) $22 million contract to “re-establish police, justice, and prison functions in post conflict Iraq.” The contract will be bid out to competitors after one year. The contract raises a few eyebrows. The Reston, Virginia-based company has donated more than $160,000 to the Republican Party and its employees have been involved in a number of serious scandals. [Insight Magazine, 4/11/2003; New York Times, 10/4/2003] In Bosnia, for example, employees of the company were accused of operating a sex-slave ring of young women, keeping under-aged girls as concubines, and videotaping a DynCorp supervisor having sex with two girls. Although they were fired from their jobs, they were never prosecuted. [Los Angeles Times, 4/14/2002; New York Times, 10/13/2002; Insight Magazine, 4/11/2003] One of the whistle-blowers, Ben Johnston, told Congress in April 2002: “DynCorp employees were living off post and owning these children and these women and girls as slaves. Well, that makes all Americans look bad. I believe DynCorp is the worst diplomat our country could ever want overseas.” [New York Times, 10/13/2002] In Ecuador, DynCorp has been accused of allowing herbicides applied in Colombia to drift across the border killing legitimate crops, causing illness, and killing children. [New York Times, 10/13/2002] Commenting on the contract, an unnamed congressional aid tells Insight Magazine: “There are some strange things about how this contract was issued. [B]ecause why would CSC use an offshore subsidiary? Is it so they won’t have to pay taxes on this money? Also, why wasn’t this contract put up for bid? Why was DynCorp the chosen recipient?” [New York Times, 10/13/2002]

British police discover a ricin lab allegedly connected to a militant training camp in northern Iraq controlled by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Six suspects are arrested in London. The US has known about the camp and its ties to chemical weapons production for months, and twice the US military has drawn up plans for a strike upon it, and twice the White House has decided against taking action (see June 2002 and November 2002). Based on these new developments in London, the US military draws up a third attack plan against the camp, but again the White House rejects taking action. [MSNBC, 3/2/2004] Communications intercepts indicate that al-Zarqawi is still making calls on his satellite phone from within the camp. [Wall Street Journal, 10/25/2004] Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong, deputy commander to Gen. Tommy Franks at Central Command at the time, will later say that the training camp “was so troubling to us. We almost took them out three months before the Iraq war started. We almost took that thing, but we were so concerned that the chemical cloud from there could devastate the region that we chose to take them by land rather than by smart weapons.” [PBS Frontline, 6/20/2006] However, in March 2003 shortly after the Iraq war begins, the camp will actually be hit by air strikes and not the land attack indicated by DeLong (see March 20, 2003). NBC News will later comment, “Military officials insist their case for attacking al-Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the [Bush] administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam [Hussein].” [MSNBC, 3/2/2004] President Bush will secretly decide around early March 2003 not to attack the camp until the US invasion of Iraq is underway later that month (see Early March 2003).

Jay Garner. [Source: US Army]The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) is created by the Pentagon to direct the post-war administration of Iraq, and signed into existence by President Bush. Its head, retired Army General Jay Garner, ostensibly reports to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith (see Fall 2002), but Garner will later say that once he is in Iraq proper, General Tommy Franks of the US Central Command (CENTCOM) “will be my boss.” ORHA is later renamed the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). David Kay, a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and a former UN weapons inspector, had initially been selected to head the office, but he declined the invitation. Associates of Kay tell the New York Times that Kay felt the new agency seemed relatively uninterested in the task of promoting democracy. [New York Times, 2/23/2003; New York Times, 4/2/2003; Roberts, 2008, pp. 126, 134] Garner is considered an excellent selection, having led the relief effort for the Kurds of northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. But he faces an uphill battle, as ORHA’s functionality is plagued from the outset by a severe lack of time, uncertain funding, and incessant interdepartmental strife, particularly between the State and Defense Departments. Most ORHA workers will not have reported for duty by the time the invasion begins. And attempts to recruit experts from other agencies will be blocked by Feith and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who impose strict ideological and bureaucratic restrictions on Garner’s selections for his staff. [Roberts, 2008, pp. 126, 134]

Bechtel wins a second contract from USAID to work on rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure. Work will include the “repair of power generation facilities, electrical grids, municipal water systems and sewage systems; continued rehabilitation or repair of airport facilities; and additional dredging, repair and upgrading of the seaport at Umm Qasr.” The company will also “repair and build government and public facilities such as schools, selected ministry buildings and major irrigation structures, as well as restore essential transport links.” The contract has the potential to be worth as much as $1.8 billion. [US Agency for International Development, 1/6/2004; Financial Times, 1/7/2004]

US Army personnel at the US Blue Grass Army Depot discover a leaking mustard gas 155-mm artillery shell in one of its storage igloos. The base stores “about 55,000 rockets, land mines and other artillery with about 523 tons of chemical weapons,” the Associated Press reports. [Associated Press, 1/6/2003]

The Russian Supreme Court outlaws a number of Islamic organizations. The “black list” of groups, compiled by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), includes Asbat al-Ansar, a Sunni militant group based in Lebanon. [Interfax, 3/15/2007] In late 2006, the US will begin providing funds through the Lebanese government to this and other militant Sunni groups as part of an effort to rollback the influence of Iran and the Shiites in Iraq (see Late 2006).

Victoria “Torie” Clark, the head of public relations for the Defense Department (see May 2001), develops the idea of embedding reporters with troops during the US invasion of Iraq. In a memo for the National Security Council, Clarke, with the approval of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, argues that allowing journalists to report from the battlefields and front lines will give Americans the chance to get the story, both “good or bad—before others seed the media with disinformation and distortions, as they most certainly will continue to do. Our people in the field need to tell our story. Only commanders can ensure the media get to the story alongside the troops. We must organize for and facilitate access of national and international media to our forces, including those forces engaged in ground operations.” [US Department of Defense, 2/2003 ; Bill Berkowitz, 5/10/2008]

Of the 35,000 Iraqis detained at one point or another by US forces, only about 1,300 are ever charged with a crime and only half of those are found guilty. The British Liberal Democrat party, which obtained the numbers from US Central Command, argues that the detentions are only serving to fuel the insurgency by creating discontent among the civilian population. [Guardian, 11/15/2005]

US National Guard units deployed to Iraq are less well-equipped than their counterparts in the Army. Helicopters lack aircraft survivability equipment which allows the helicopters to evade enemy fire. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12/27/2003] Guardsmen complain of shortages of body armor, night vision goggles, ammunition, radar, uniforms, boots, cold weather gear, and two-way radios. Some guardsmen say that the equipment shortage are at times so severe that if they were operating according to Army rules the lack of equipment would have amounted to an “automatic mission-abort criteria.” [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12/27/2003; CBS News, 10/31/2004]

The US military has drawn up plans three times between June 2002 and January 2003 to launch an air strike against a training camp in northern Iraq controlled by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that is said to be producing chemical weapons (see June 2002, November 2002, and January 2003), but months have passed and the White House has not given any formal reply to any of the attack plans. Finally, several weeks before the start of the US invasion of Iraq in late March 2003, the White House indicates that President Bush has rejected any strike on the camp until after the US invasion of Iraq begins. The camp will be attacked on March 20. Bush administration officials will later say the camp was not targeted for a number of reasons, including uncertain intelligence reports and the difficulties of hitting al-Zarqawi within a large camp area. But Gen. John Keane, the US Army’s vice chief of staff at the time, will later call the camp “one of the best targets we ever had.” He and other officials will claim the intelligence on al-Zarqawi’s location was sound and the risk of collateral damage was small due to the camp’s location in a remote mountain area. But Pentagon spokesperson Lawrence Di Rita will later claim that one reason for not taking action was “the president’s decision to engage the international community on Iraq.” [Wall Street Journal, 10/25/2004] And CIA official Michael Scheuer will later say, “The reasons the intelligence service got for not shooting al-Zarqawi was simply that the President and the National Security Council decided it was more important not to give the Europeans the impression we were gunslingers.… Mr. Bush had Mr. al-Zarqawi in his sights for almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn’t shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq.” [Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 5/1/2006]

The US Army Corps of Engineers awards Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a sole-source monopoly contract to repair and operate Iraq’s oil infrastructure. The contract is awarded in secrecy without any competing bids from other qualified companies. Halliburton will eventually charge the government $2.4 billion for its work. The Defense Contract Audit Agency will find that about $263 million of these costs are either questionable or unsupported. Despite this, the US Army will pay Halliburton all but $10.1 million, or 3.8 percent, of the disputed costs. [New York Times, 2/27/2006; US Congress, 3/28/2006, pp. 3-4 ]

General Jay Garner, the head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA—see January 2003), admits to reporters, “We started very slowly” in preparing for handling the reconstruction of post-Saddam Iraq. [Roberts, 2008, pp. 126]Garner Knew Problems Would Arise - Garner will later say: “When I went to see [Defense Secretary] Rumsfeld at the end of January [2003], I said, OK, I’ll do this for the next few months for you. I said, you know, Let me tell you something, Mr. Secretary. George Marshall started in 1942 working on a 1945 problem. You’re starting in February working on what’s probably a March or April problem. And he said, I know, but we have to do the best with the time that we have. So that kind of frames everything.” 'Never Recovered' - Sir Jeremy Greenstock, currently Britain’s special representative to Iraq, will add: “The administration of Iraq never recovered [from the failure to plan]. It was a vacuum in security that became irremediable, at least until the surge of 2007. And to that extent, four years were not only wasted but allowed to take on the most terrible cost because of that lack of planning, lack of resources put in on the ground. And I see that lack of planning as residing in the responsibility of the Pentagon, which had taken charge, the office of the secretary of defense, with the authority of the vice president and the president, obviously, standing over that department of government.” [Vanity Fair, 2/2009]

Former Marine colonel and convicted felon Oliver North (see May-June, 1989), now a conservative radio host, is embedded with a Marine unit by Fox News. North reports “rumors” that French officials at the Embassy in Baghdad are destroying documents proving French complicity in Iraq’s chemical—and biological—weapons programs. The report is quickly proven false. Fox spokeswoman Irena Steffen tells a newspaper that North is “a military contributor to Fox. He is neither a reporter nor a correspondent.” [New Yorker, 5/26/2003]

A building in Baghdad is bombed during the US invasion of Iraq. [Source: Reuters]The US begins its official invasion of Iraq (see (7:40 a.m.) March 19, 2003). While most observers expect a traditional air assault, the US planners instead launch what they call a “Shock and Awe” combination of air and ground assaults designed to avoid direct confrontations with Iraqi military forces and instead destroy Iraqi military command structures. [CNN, 3/20/2003; CNN, 3/20/2003; Unger, 2007, pp. 302] The initial invasion force consists of 250,000 US forces augmented by 45,000 British troops and small contingents from Poland, Australia, and Denmark, elements of the so-called “coalition of the willing.” [BBC, 3/18/2003; Unger, 2007, pp. 302]

US broadcast and cable news outlets begin covering the first US strikes against Iraqi targets (see March 19, 2003 and March 19-20, 2003), but, as author and media critic Frank Rich will later note, their coverage often lacks accuracy. News broadcasts report “a decapitation strike” (see March 20, 2003) that lead US viewers to believe for hours that Saddam Hussein has been killed. CNN’s title card for its strike coverage reads, “Zero Hour for Iraq Arrives”; during its initial coverage, CNN features New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who credits “a slew of information from defectors” and other “intelligence sources”—those who had provided the foundation for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s “impressive speech to the United Nations” (see February 5, 2003)—with the imminent discovery and destruction of Iraq’s WMD stockpiles. “One person in Washington told me that the list could total more than 1,400 of those sites,” Miller says. Pentagon PR chief Victoria Clarke, who had created both the Pentagon’s “embed program” of reporters going into battle with selected military units (see February 2003) and the “military analysts” program of sending carefully selected retired flag officers to the press and television news programs to give the administration’s views of the war (see Early 2002 and Beyond), has overseen the construction of a briefing room for press conferences from US CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar: the $200,000 facility was designed by a production designer who had worked for, among others, Disney, MGM, and illusionist David Blaine. Clarke and the Pentagon marketing officials succeed in having their term to describe the initial assault, “shock and awe,” promulgated throughout the broadcast and cable coverage. (Fox and MSNBC will soon oblige the Pentagon by changing the name of their Iraqi coverage programming to the official administration name for the invasion, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”) During the assault, as Rich will later write, “the pyrotechnics of Shock and Awe looked like a distant fireworks display, or perhaps the cool computer graphics of a Matrix-inspired video game, rather than the bombing of a large city. None of Baghdad’s nearly six million people were visible.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon later says, “If you had hired actors [instead of the network news anchors], you could not have gotten better coverage.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 73-75]

US air war planners, who are required to get pre-approval for air strikes they believe may kill more than 30 civilians, send more than 50 such requests to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld approves all of the strikes. [New York Times, 7/20/2003]

The militant Sunni group, Asbat al-Ansar, begins sending fighters to Iraq. The group is based in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. A deputy commander of the group later tells the New York Times, “The US is oppressing a lot of people. They are killing a lot of innocents, but one day they are getting paid back.” [New York Times, 3/16/2007] The Bush administration, which has repeatedly called Iraq the new front in the war on terrorism, will reportedly begin funneling funds through the Lebanese government to Asbat al-Ansar and other militant Sunni groups in late 2006 and early 2007 in an effort to rollback the influence of Iran and the Shiites in Iraq (see Late 2006).

On the second day of a US invasion of Iraq, the US military conducts an airstrike against the training camp in Northern Iraq controlled by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The camp is territory controlled by Kurdish rebels and it is believed that a chemical weapons lab is there. Prior to the start of the war, the US drew up three separate plans to attack the camp with air strikes, but each time the plans were rejected by the White House. [MSNBC, 3/2/2004] More than 40 cruise missiles hit the camp near the town of Khurmal, destroying what Gen. Tommy Franks calls a “massive terrorist facility.” But Saddam Hussein had been given an ultimatum before the start of the war, which meant the timing of the start of the war had been announced several days in advance. Not surprisingly, by the time the camp is hit, al-Zarqawi and many of his followers had already left it. One of al-Zarqawi’s top lieutenants, Abdul Hadi Daghlas, a.k.a. Abu Taisir, is killed. Al-Zarqawi will release an audio message several months later lamenting his death. [Wall Street Journal, 2/10/2004] Former National Security Council member Roger Cressey will later claim, “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq.” [MSNBC, 3/2/2004]

President George Bush issues an executive order transferring frozen Iraqi assets held in US banks to a US Treasury Special Purpose Account (TSPA) that has been established at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The secretary of the treasury, currently John W. Snow, is given authority over the funds. [US President, 3/20/2003 ]

A study by George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs examines the 600 hours of war coverage by the nation’s broadcast news organizations between the coverage of the first strikes (see March 19, 2003) and the fall of Baghdad (see April 9, 2003). The study shows that of the 1,710 stories broadcast, only 13.5 percent show any images of dead or wounded civilians or soldiers, either Iraqi or American. The study says that television news coverage “did not differ discernibly” from the heavily sanitized, Pentagon-controlled coverage of the 1991 Gulf War (see August 11, 1990 and January 3, 1991). “A war with hundreds of coalition and tens of thousands of Iraqi casualties” is transformed on US television screens “into something closer to a defense contractor’s training video: a lot of action, but no consequences, as if shells simply disappeared into the air and an invisible enemy magically ceased to exist.” A similar study by Columbia University’s Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that “none of the embedded stories (see February 2003 and March-April 2003) studied showed footage of people, either US soldiers or Iraqis, being struck, injured, or killed by weapons fired.” In fact, only 20 percent of the stories by embedded journalists show anyone else besides the journalist. Focus on Anchors - Author and media critic Frank Rich will later write: “The conveying of actual news often seemed subsidiary to the networks’ mission to out-flag-wave one another and to make their own personnel, rather than the war’s antagonists, the leading players in the drama.… TV viewers were on more intimate terms with [CNN anchor] Aaron Brown’s and [Fox News anchor] Shep Smith’s perceptions of the war than with the collective thoughts of all those soon-to-be-liberated ‘Iraqi people’ whom the anchors kept apothesizing. Iraqis were the best seen-but-not-heard dress extras in the drama, alternately pictured as sobbing, snarling, waving, and cheering.” Fox News - Rich will say that Fox News is the most egregious of the lot, reporting what he mockingly calls “all victory all the time.” During the time period analyzed, one Fox anchor says, “[O]bjectively speaking [it is] hard to believe things could go more successfully.” Another Fox anchor reports “extraordinary news, the city of Basra under control” even as that city is sliding into guerrilla warfare and outright anarchy. Neoconservative Fred Barnes, one of Fox’s regular commentators, calls the competition “weenies” for actually reporting US casualties. [Rich, 2006, pp. 78]

Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, gives a speech to the National Newspaper Association in which he discloses classified information about the impending US invasion of Iraq. Roberts tells the audience that he has “been in touch with our intelligence community,” and reveals that the CIA has informed President Bush and the National Security Council “of intelligence information from what we call human intelligence that indicated the location of Saddam Hussein and his leadership in a bunker in the suburbs of Baghdad.” Roberts then tells the audience that Bush, after conferring with his top military advisers, has “authorized a pre-emptive surgical strike with 40 Tomahawk Missiles launched by ship and submarines and so-called bunker bombs by F-117 stealth aircraft. I do not have a damage assessment. The Iraqis report 14 killed and one wounded and are reporting damage in residential areas.” The initial US strikes against an Iraqi governmental complex, Dora Park, missed Hussein. In 2006, four former intelligence officials tell a news reporter that Roberts’s disclosure hampered US efforts to capture Hussein. They will note that Roberts, who is a staunch defender of the Bush administration’s attempts to keep sensitive information out of the press, is never held accountable for what they term a serious security breach; there is no investigation, and his remarks are widely ignored by the press. According to the intelligence officials, Roberts’s disclosure alerts others, including hostile Iraqis, that the US has human intelligence sources close to Hussein. Roberts “had given up that we had a penetration of [Saddam’s] inner circle,” one official will say. “It was the worst thing you could ever do.” The officials will say it is unclear what effect, if any, Roberts’s disclosure has on Hussein’s efforts to escape the US. A Republican Congressional aide familiar with the incident will later call Roberts’s remarks “a mistake” and a “dumb act,” but not one “done with bad intent.” The aide will say that Roberts may have disclosed the information out of an urge for “self-aggrandizement.” [National Journal, 4/25/2006]

Trade between Iraq and Iran grows at an estimated annual rate of 30 percent after the US and British invasion. “The economies of Iraq and Iran, the largest Shiite-majority countries in the world, are becoming closely integrated, with Iranian goods flooding Iraqi markets and Iraqi cities looking to Iran for basic services,” the New York Times will report in early 2007. After the invasion, Iraq begins importing electricity and a wide variety of consumer items like Peugeot sedans, carpets, construction materials, fish, and spices. Iraqis are also going to Iran to obtain medical services. Trade between the two nations grows the fastest in the Shiite-dominated south. By 2007, Basra is importing $45 million worth of goods from Iran each year with some 100 to 150 commercial trucks crossing into Iraq from Iran each day. The trend causes concern in the White House, which accuses Iran of having a nuclear weapons program and claims that the Iranians are fueling the insurgency. According to Asaad Abu Galal, the governor of Najaf, “the Americans don’t want to bring Iranians to Najaf. The Americans want to control the sky.” Iranians are also vying for a market in the financial sector, with at least one bank applying for a license to open a branch in Baghdad. [New York Times, 3/17/2007]

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says during his daily press briefing, “Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological
and chemical particularly. This was the reason that the president felt so
strongly that we needed to take military action to disarm Saddam Hussein, since
he would not do it himself.” [White House, 3/21/2003]

The United States admits to using Mark 77 firebombs, an incendiary weapon that has virtually the same effect as napalm (see 1942), in Iraq. The weapon is so similar in fact that troops commonly refer to it as napalm. [CNN, 3/21/2003; Sydney Morning Herald, 3/22/2003] In August 2003, Marine Colonel Mark Daly will confirm that Mark 77 bombs were dropped by Marine jets around the Kuwait-Iraq border at the start of the war. A senior Pentagon official confirms that the bombs have “similar destructive characteristics” to napalm. Early reports of “napalm” being used in an attack on Iraqi troops at Safwan Hill, near the Kuwait border, by an Australian journalist were denied by US officials, who claimed that the military destroyed its last batch of napalm in April 2001. However, only the Vietnam-era Napalm-B was actually destroyed. [Sunday Mirror, 8/10/2003] According to Marine Colonel Randolph Alles, “The generals love napalm—it has a big psychological effect.” [San Diego Union-Tribune, 8/5/2003] A Pentagon official says: “It is like this: you’ve got an enemy that’s hard to get at. And it will save your own lives to use it.” The Mark 77 is loaded with 44 pounds of gelling compound and 63 gallons of jet fuel. The use of incendiary weapons on civilian populations is banned by Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (see October 10, 1980-December 2, 1983), which also restricts the use of these weapons against military targets that are located within a concentration of civilians. The UN’s ban, passed in 1980, has never been signed by the US. [Sunday Mirror, 8/10/2003]

Victoria Clarke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, says during a televised briefing at the Pentagon that the administration knows about “a number of sites” where Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. Clarke refuses to provide any estimate of how many sites the US knows of. [Washington Post, 3/23/2003, pp. A27]

CNN and the Sydney Morning Herald report that the US used napalm to destroy an Iraqi intelligence gathering operation on top of Safwan Hill in southern Iraq. A source tells reporter Lindsay Murdoch that US Navy aircraft dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives and napalm (see 1942). However, a US Navy spokesman in Washington, Lieutenant Commander Danny Hernandez, denies that napalm was used in the attack. Hernandez claims that it is not even in the military’s arsenal. [CNN, 3/21/2003; Sydney Morning Herald, 3/22/2003] It is later learned (see August 2003) that the actual weapons were Mark 77 Firebombs, an incendiary weapon that has virtually the same effect as napalm.

The US Air Force website emphatically denies the use of napalm in Iraq (see March 22, 2003), posting a “disinformation alert” on its website. “The claims that we are using napalm in Iraq are patently false,” the alert claims. It also says that the United States’ stock of napalm bombs was destroyed in 2001 and that the Sydney Morning Herald has said it will be pulling its story (see March 22, 2003), which it never does. [US Department of Defense, 3/22/2003]

Gen. Tommy Franks says during a news conference in Qatar: “There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them.” [Washington Post, 3/23/2003] The four-star general says he gets information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction every day, noting he has “no doubt” that Iraq possesses them. He states some of this information is good intelligence while other is speculation. Franks also says he knows that more than two dozen Iraqi SCUD missile launchers are unaccounted for since the end of the last Gulf War. [American forces Press Services News Article, 3/22/2003]

Saddam Hussein, proclaimed as most likely dead by the US media for nearly four days (see March 19-20, 2003), makes a 25-minute televised speech from an undisclosed location inside Iraq. Much of the speech is given over to taunting the US. [Rich, 2006, pp. 80]

Kenneth Adelman. [Source: Public domain]Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan arms control official who is close to top Bush military officials and serves on a Pentagon advisory panel, says, “I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.” Adelman claims these weapons are likeliest to be found near Tikrit and Baghdad, because they’re the most protected places with the best troops. Adelman acknowledges some surprise that they have not been used yet. “One thing we may find is Saddam Hussein ordered them to be used and soldiers didn’t follow the orders. The threat of use goes down every day because adherence to orders goes down.” [Washington Post, 3/23/2003, pp. A27]

A photo of a slain US soldier as broadcast on Al Jazeera. [Source: Al Jazeera / TheWE (.cc)]With the first broadcast of graphic, disturbing images from the Iraq war on Al Jazeera television news shows, the media coverage of the US strike begins turning away from what media critic Frank Rich will later call “cheerleading” (see March 19-20, 2003) to a more somber assessment of the events taking place in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, is embarrassed when host Bob Schieffer shows part of an Al Jazeera film clip of US troops being killed. (The Pentagon is also denying media reports that around ten US soldiers were either captured or missing. The juxtaposition is inopportune for Rumsfeld and the “shock and awe” story he and the Defense Department wish to tell.) The Pentagon will quickly decide that for the US media to show such images violates “the principles of the Geneva Conventions” and attempt to stop them from being shown in the American press. The Pentagon’s proscription of such images being published and broadcast is only partially successful. ABC news anchor Charles Gibson engages in an on-air discussion of the propriety of airing such images with reporter Ted Koppel. Gibson says to broadcast such disturbing images would be “simply disrespectful,” a point with which Koppel, embedded with the Third Infantry Division, disagrees. The news media is “ginning up patriotic feelings” in covering the war, Koppel says: “I feel that we do have an obligation to remind people in the most graphic way that war is a dreadful thing.… The fact of the matter is young Americans are dying. Young Iraqis are dying. And I think to turn our faces away from that is a mistake.… To sanitize it too much is a dreadful mistake.” However, Koppel’s is not a popular argument. CNN decided at the onset of the war to minimize its broadcast of graphic imagery in deference to “the sensibilities of our viewers.” The other US television news outlets make similar decisions, leaving it to the BBC and other non-American news organizations to show what Rich calls “the savagery and blood of warfare.” Ex-Marine Anthony Swofford, who wrote the bestseller Jarhead about his experiences during the 1991 Gulf War, later says the television coverage is so sanitized that he quickly shut off his TV “and stayed with the print.… [T]he actual experience of combat doesn’t make it to the other side of the screen.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 76]

Privates Jessica Lynch and Lori Piestewa. [Source: CNN]US Army Private First Class Jessica Lynch, a supply clerk, is injured in a Humvee crash in the city of Nasiriyah. Lynch’s convoy had become separated from its mates and wound up lost in Nasiriyah, where it came under attack. An Army investigation later shows that Lynch and her colleagues were lost due to exhaustion, several wrong turns, and faulty communications (see July 10, 2003), all of which contribute to the convoy’s misdirection. Eleven US soldiers die in the ambush; Lynch and five others, including her close friend Private Lori Piestewa, are taken captive (see October 24, 2003). Piestewa is mortally wounded and will die within a few hours. Besides Lynch and Piestewa, the others taken prisoner are Sergeant James Riley; Specialists Edgar Hernandez, Joseph Hudson, and Shoshana Johnson; and Private First Class Patrick Miller. [Baltimore Sun, 11/11/2003; POW Network, 6/22/2006]

Photos of five US captives broadcast by Al Jazeera. The soldiers are, clockwise from the left: Spc. Shoshana Johnson, Spc. Edgar Hernandez, Spc. Joseph Hudson, Pfc. Patrick Miller, and Sgt. James Riley. [Source: Al Jazeera / CNN]The Arab television network Al Jazeera broadcasts graphic close-up shots of dead US soldiers taken during the same ambush that saw the capture of Private Jessica Lynch (see March 23, 2003). The bodies are sprawled on a concrete floor; a smiling Iraqi fighter points out the individual bodies for the camera. At least two of the soldiers appear to have been shot, one between the eyes. In the same broadcast, four exhausted and shaken captured US soldiers, also members of Lynch’s unit, are shown giving short and uninformative answers to their captors. Still photos of five soldiers are shown by the network. [Washington Post, 6/17/2003] The still images of the prisoners are shown on at least one US news show, NBC’s “Dateline.” [New York Times, 3/28/2003] The parents of one of the captives, Shoshana Johnson, learned of their daughter’s capture from a Spanish-language news broadcast on Telemundo before they were informed by the Pentagon. Joseph Hudson’s mother learned of her son’s capture from a Filipino television broadcast. Johnson’s sister, Army Captain Nikki Johnson, says that it is not necessarily wrong for footage of American POWs to be broadcast because “[y]ou get to see the condition the soldiers are in now. It’ll be very hard for them to mistreat them and try and say, ‘Oh, we found them that way.’” Johnson’s father, Claude, who fought in the 1991 Gulf War as an Army sergeant, says, “The instant we found out they were prisoners, we should have been talking to the people in the Red Cross and ensuring that somebody got out there. We can’t turn the clock back. What is done is done. Now is the time to get the people from the Red Cross or whatever organization is available to go in and make a true assessment, and then we can go from there.” Miller’s half-brother Thomas Hershberger says, “We are glad he wasn’t killed. We hope he makes it back. We all love him, and we hope he is treated humanely.” Hudson’s mother Anecita says tearfully, “I just would like [to say] to the president of United States of America [to] do something about it—to save my son. And I want him to come home.” [CNN, 5/25/2003] Excluding Lynch, the US soldiers will be freed 22 days later; Lynch will be rescued from a Nasiriyah hospital nine days later (see June 17, 2003).

Tornado fighter plane similar to the one shot down by a US Patriot battery. [Source: Army-Technology (.com)]The Patriot missile defense system, so famous from iconic video footage shot during the 1991 Gulf War (see Mid-1991), destroys a British Tornado jet fighter in mid-flight, killing both of its crew members. The Tornado is in friendly airspace, is alone, and had already completed its mission and released its weapons, when the Patriot mistakes the Tornado for an enemy missile and destroys it. US military spokesmen explain the incident as due to a “computer glitch.” Originally built to shoot down aircraft, its manufacturer, Raytheon, modified it just before the 1991 Gulf War to shoot down tactical ballistic missiles. When the Army deployed Patriot batteries in Iraq, the crews quickly realized there were problems with the system. The Tornado is just the first of an array of problems manifested by the Patriot. The Tornado’s mission should have gone smoothly, according to retired Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason, who will advise an upcoming British Parliamentary inquiry into the shoot down. “They had fulfilled their mission and they were returning without weapons back to base.” US Officials Misleading British? - Mason does not believe the Army’s “computer glitch” story. “If the system is confusing missiles with planes, that is just not just a minor glitch. The two are so different, that it’s difficult really to imagine a system could do that.” One of the biggest problems with the Patriot system is that it is completely automated: it tracks airborne objects, identifies them, decides whether or not to fire, and, if its operator does not override the machine in a very few seconds, fires. Reporter Robert Riggs, embedded with a Patriot battery, will recall, “This was like a bad science fiction movie in which the computer starts creating false targets. And you have the operators of the system wondering is this a figment of a computer’s imagination or is this real. They were seeing what were called spurious targets that were identified as incoming tactical ballistic missiles. Sometimes, they didn’t exist at all in time and space. Other times, they were identifying friendly US aircraft as incoming TBMs.” A US Army report will find that “various Patriot locations throughout the theater” routinely identify “spurious TBMs”—tactical ballistic missiles that didn’t exist. Most of the time, the Patriot computers correct the mistake on their own. Sometimes, they do not. Riggs will recall, “We were in one of the command posts. And I walked in and all the operators and officers are focused intently on their screens. And so you know something’s going on here. And suddenly the door flies open, and a Raytheon tech representative runs in and says, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ Well, that got our attention real quick.” Systematic Problems - Two days later, a US F-16 destroys a Patriot battery that mistakenly targeted it (see March 25, 2003). Eight days after that, a US Navy pilot dies when Patriot missile fire destroys his plane (see April 2, 2003). Reporters find that the Patriot has had systematic problems in identifying friendly and hostile targets since 1991 (see June 27, 2003). [Carter, 2004, pp. 52; CBS News, 6/27/2004]

Halliburton issues a press release declaring that it has won a contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to extinguish oil well fires and do emergency repairs to Iraq’s oil infrastructure in post-invasion Iraq. The firefighting work will be subcontracted to Houston-based companies Boots & Coots International Well Control, Inc. and Wild Well Control, Inc. [Halliburton, 3/24/2003]

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says on CBS’s “Face the Nation”: “We have seen intelligence over many months that they have chemical and biological weapons, and that they have dispersed them and that they’re weaponized and that, in one case at least, the command and control arrangements have been established.” [Village Voice, 6/18/2003]

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz tells a BBC news correspondent “Until the regime is gone it’s going to be very hard to do anything. Even in cities that are liberated. I think when the people of Basra no longer feel the threat of that regime, you are going to see an explosion of joy and relief.” [BBC, 3/25/2003]

Two days after a British Tornado fighter plane is shot down by a US Patriot anti-aircraft missile battery (see March 23-April 2, 2003), a US F-16 pilot is “painted” by what he believes is an enemy missile system. He fires his own missile in self-defense, destroying, not an Iraqi installation, but a Patriot battery. Former Congressional investigator Joseph Cironcione will say of the Tornado and F-16 incidents, “There was no way that Patriot system should have still been up and running, targeting aircraft. They should have stood down, knowing that they had a fatal problem on their hands.” [CBS News, 6/27/2004]

Bernard Trainor. [Source: PBS]The New York Times examines the influence of retired military officers in influencing public opinion on the invasion of Iraq. Reporter John Cushman, Jr writes that “a whole constellation of retired one-, two-, three- and four-star generals—including many who led the recent wars in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf—can be seen night and day across the television firmament, navigation aids for viewers lost in a narrative that can be foggier than war itself.” All of the news broadcasters, including cable news outlets CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, and the commercial networks’ news shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC rely on retired military officers to explain to their viewers what is happening in Iraq. Cushman acknowledges the “deep perspective” that the retired officers bring to the war coverage, particularly those who led the same units now on the ground, or at least “commanded, trained, or shared barracks and beers with the current commanders.” Retired Marine General Gregory Newbold recently told an ABC News audience, “If things haven’t gone exactly according to script, they’ve gone according to plan.” Newbold helped draw up the plans for the invasion as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Questions Raised - How much do the military analysts actually know? Cushman asks, and are they giving out more information than they should? Many of the analysts receive what Cushman calls “occasional briefings from the Pentagon” (he is apparently unaware of the Pentagon’s propaganda operation involving these selfsame analysts—see April 20, 2008 and Early 2002 and Beyond), and garner much of their information from public sources and from their friends and former colleagues in the military. Cushman goes on to observe that almost all of the analysts have “evident sympathies with the current commanders”; between those sympathies and their “immersion in [military] doctrines,” their objectivity is in doubt—or as Cushman delicately phrases it, their experience and bias “sometimes seem to immunize them to the self-imposed skepticism of the news organizations that now employ them.” After conducting “a detailed review of their recent remarks,” Cushman says that it is a rarity when an analyst criticizes the conduct of the war. “Instead, they tend gravely to point out the timeless risks of combat.” One sharp exception is from retired Army General Wesley Clark, the former supreme commander of NATO, who recently questioned whether the military had committed enough troops on the ground. More typical is recent remarks by retired Army General Wayne Downing, a commander in the 1991 Gulf War. Downing lavished praise on the invasion’s supreme commander, General Tommy Franks. Cushman notes that Downing “rattl[ed] off the story of his old comrade’s career as if by rote.” Technical Details Vs. Analysis - The retired officers do “reasonably well” in explaining what Cushman calls “the nuts and bolts of an operation, the technical details of weapons, the decisions facing American and British commanders.” Their speculations about what the Iraqis might be doing and thinking are more problematic. One analyst, retired Marine General Bernard Trainor, almost seemed to invite chemical or biological retaliation from the Iraqis when he told an MSNBC audience: “If he moves, we kill him; if he stays put, we kill him. And regardless of what they’re told to do over the network, whatever is left of the command and control, unless it comes down to using chemical weapons, then the rest of it is just ancillary. If this is going to be the communication of red telephone, if you will, to tell people to launch chemical weapons—and we’re reaching that point in the operation—if they’re going to use their stuff, they’d better start thinking about it, because pretty soon we’re in downtown Baghdad.” Clark, considered the most polished and urbane of the analysts, takes a different tack, and notes repeatedly that the analysts are careful not to give away details of current operations and thus endanger American troops. All of the analysts, Cushman writes, “emphasize the gravity of what the military is up to in Iraq.” As Clark told an audience, “It’s not entertainment.” [New York Times, 3/25/2003]

US Secretary of State Colin Powell says in an interview, “But as soon as possible, we want to have working alongside the commander an interim Iraqi authority, people representing the people of Iraq. And, as that authority grows and gets greater credibility from the people of Iraq, we want to turn over more and more responsibilities to them.” [Doordarshan Television, 3/26/2003]

In a speech to US troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, President Bush says: “We will help the Iraqi people to find the benefits and assume the duties of self-government. The form of those institutions will arise from Iraq’s own culture and its own choices.” [US President, 3/31/2003]

British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith warns Prime Minister Tony Blair in a memo that any measures taken in Iraq by the occupying powers not related to the issue of security would be unlawful without an additional security council resolution. “My view is that a further security council resolution is needed to authorize imposing reform and restructuring of Iraq and its government,” Lord Goldsmith writes. “The government has concluded that the removal of the current Iraqi regime from power is necessary to secure disarmament, but the longer the occupation of Iraq continues, and the more the tasks undertaken by an interim administration depart from the main objective, the more difficult it will be to justify the lawfulness of the occupation.” He says that attempts to implement “wide-ranging reforms of governmental and administrative structures,” change the status of public officials or judges except in exceptional cases, or “the imposition of major structural economic reforms would not be authorized by international law.” Goldsmith also expressed this opinion orally during a cabinet meeting. [Guardian, 5/22/2003] The basis for Goldsmith’s position is likely the Hague regulations of 1907 (see October 18, 1907), which requires that an occupying power respect the laws of the country it occupies. [New York Times, 1/10/2004; FPIF Policy Report, 7/2004]

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage tells the House Committee on Appropriations during a hearing on a supplemental war regulation: “This is not Afghanistan… When we approach the question of Iraq, we realize here is a country which has a resource. And it’s obvious, it’s oil. And it can bring in and does bring in a certain amount of revenue each year… $10, $15, even $18 billion… this is not a broke country.” [US Congress, 9/30/2003]

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says during a Senate hearing, “When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government and the international community.” [Financial Times, 1/16/2004] Rumsfeld says that the US would most likely convene an “international donors’ conference” to put together reconstruction financing. [Rich, 2006, pp. 85]

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz tells the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee that Iraq’s oil wealth will help fund post-war reconstruction. “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people,” he says. “On a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 billion and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years.” [St. Petersburg Times, 4/2/2003; Financial Times, 1/16/2004] He adds, “We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” [New York Times, 10/5/2003; CNN, 4/15/2004]

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sends a classified paper to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, and CIA Director George Tenet. In the paper, Rumsfeld says that the US should not hand over control of Iraq to the Iraqis too quickly. There should first be a guarantee that any new Iraqi government will be “friendly” to the US, he says. [Gordon and Trainor, 3/14/2006, pp. 479]

According to multiple sources, the Defense Department’s head of intelligence, Stephen Cambone, dispatches a quasi-military team to Iraq in the weeks after the invasion. Cambone’s “off-the-books” team, consisting of four or five men, operates under the auspices of Defense Department official Douglas Feith and the Office of Special Plans (OSP—see September 2002). The team is tasked to secure the following, in order of priority: downed Navy pilot Scott Speicher, Iraq’s WMD stockpiles, and Saddam Hussein. The sources, who speak to reporter Larisa Alexandrovna in 2006 on the condition of anonymity, include three US intelligence sources and a person with close ties to the United Nations Security Council. Speicher, classified as “killed in action” (KIA) after being shot down in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, was touted by Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi (see 1992-1996, November 6-8, 2001, December 20, 2001, and February 2002) as alive and held as a prisoner of war as part of Chalabi’s push for the US invasion of Iraq. Chalabi also told Bush administration officials of enormous stockpiles of chemical and biological WMD throughout Iraq (see Summer 2002, Fall 2002, and Early 2003). Cambone’s team operates outside the auspices of other officially sanctioned groups such as Task Force 20 and other units operating in Iraq before the invasion itself, though the team may be comprised of TF20 personnel. The team is not tasked with actually finding and destroying any WMD stockpiles so much as it is ordered to find such a stockpile and thereby solve what the UN Security Council source calls the administration’s “political WMD” problem. “They come in the summer of 2003, bringing in Iraqis, interviewing them,” the UN source later says. “Then they start talking about WMD and they say to [these Iraqi intelligence officers] that ‘Our president is in trouble. He went to war saying there are WMD and there are no WMD. What can we do? Can you help us?’” [Raw Story, 1/5/2006]

A Kurdish soldier allied with US forces stands on the site where the Sargat training camp used to be. He holds a piece of a US cruise missile that hit the camp. [Source: Scott Peterson / Getty Images]US Special Forces working with local Kurdish forces overrun the small border region of Iraq controlled by the militant group Ansar al-Islam. This is where Secretary of State Colin Powell alleged militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had a ‘poison factory’ near the town of Khurmal where chemical weapons of mass destruction capable of killing thousands were made. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers says, “We think that’s probably where the ricin that was found in London probably came; at least the operatives and maybe some of the formulas came from this site.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld comments, “We’re not certain what we’ll find but we should know more in the next three days - three or four days.” [New York Daily News, 3/31/2003] In a 2007 book, CIA Director George Tenet will claim, “Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, al-Zarqawi’s camp in Khurmal was bombed by the US military. We obtained reliable human intelligence reporting and forensic samples confirming that poisons and toxins had been produced at the camp.” [Tenet, 2007, pp. 277-278] He will further claim that the camp “engaged in production and training in the use of low-level poisons such as cyanide. We had intelligence telling us that al-Zarqawi’s men had tested these poisons on animals and, in at least one case, on one of their own associates. They laughed about how well it worked.” [Tenet, 2007, pp. 350] But Tenet’s claims seem wildly overblown compared to other subsequent news reports about what was found at the camp. In late April 2003, the Los Angeles Times will report that, “Documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times, along with interviews with US and Kurdish intelligence operatives, indicate [Ansar al-Islam] was partly funded and armed from abroad; was experimenting with chemicals, including toxic agents and a cyanide-based body lotion; and had international aspirations. But the documents, statements by imprisoned Ansar guerrillas, and visits to the group’s strongholds before and after the war produced no strong evidence of connections to Baghdad and indicated that Ansar was not a sophisticated terrorist organization. The group was a dedicated, but fledgling, al-Qaeda surrogate lacking the capability to muster a serious threat beyond its mountain borders.” A crude chemical laboratory is found in the village of Sargat, but no evidence of any sophisticated equipment is found. “Tests have revealed the presence of hydrogen cyanide and potassium cyanide, poisons normally used to kill rodents and other pests. The group, according to Kurdish officials, had been experimenting on animals with a cyanide-laced cream. Several jars of peach body lotion lay at the site beside chemicals and a few empty wooden birdcages.” While a lot of documentation is found showing intention to create chemical weapons, the actual capability appears to have been quite low. [Los Angeles Times, 4/27/2003] As the Christian Science Monitor will later conclude, the “‘poison factory’ proved primitive; nothing but substances commonly used to kill rodents were found there.” [Christian Science Monitor, 10/16/2003] Journalist Jason Burke will also later comment, “As one of the first journalists to enter the [al-Qaeda] research facilities at the Darunta camp in eastern Afghanistan in 2001, I was struck by how crude they were. The Ansar al-Islam terrorist group’s alleged chemical weapons factory in northern Iraq, which I inspected the day after its capture in 2003, was even more rudimentary.” [Foreign Policy, 5/2004]

According to an unnamed US businessman interviewed by the New York Times, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq has been issuing contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply telephoning favored companies and informing them, “I have a contract for you.” [New York Times, 10/4/2003]

Shortly after the March invasion and occupation of Iraq, Iraqis become increasingly concerned about US plans for reconstruction. Iraqis fear the US will contract American companies to rebuild the country’s infrastructure instead of using native skill and labor. The former regime’s Ministry of Housing and Construction has a staff of some 4,000 employees who have been showing up to work daily since mid-April. Akkel Ansari, a ministry engineer, tells the Washington Post that he and other engineers have already begun drawing up plans to rebuild the country’s bombed-out buildings, bridges, and roads. The engineers are ready “to start repairing their damaged country as they did after the 1991 Persian Gulf War,” the Post reports. Iraqis say they are fully capable of rebuilding their country. According to Ansari, the damage is far less severe than that of the First Gulf War. Ansari tells the Washington Post, “The damage was much greater in 1991. More than 150 bridges in Iraq were destroyed in that war, and we rebuilt them all in one year.… But in this war, theft and burning caused more destruction than the bombing. We can put the pieces together again, in less time than 1991. We are ready to start.” Ministry employees say the only help they need from the US is money for salaries and help recovering equipment that was stolen during the mass looting (see April 9, 2003) that accompanied the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government. The amount needed to pay the monthly salaries of most ministry employees would be well under $100. But the US refuses to meet with the engineers. When Ansari goes to a hotel where US Army civil affairs officers are located to request funding for their work, US soldiers guarding the facility point a gun at his face and tell him to leave. Laith Amir, a chief engineer with 24 years of experience testing soil before buildings are constructed or rebuilt, tells the Post: “This is our life’s work. I love my job, and I would like to do something for my country. But we need help and financing. There is no government, no ministries. People have to be sure they will be paid.” [Washington Post, 4/26/2003]

KBR procurement manager Stephen Seamans gives his crony Shabbir Khan (see October 2002), of the Saudi conglomerate Tamimi Global Co, inside information that allows Tamimi to secure a $2 million KBR subcontract to establish a mess hall at a Baghdad palace. Seamans subsequently puts through change orders that inflate the subcontract to $4.7 million. This and other information about KBR war profiteering in Iraq comes from a federal investigation that will begin in late 2007 (see October 2006 and Beyond). [Chicago Tribune, 2/20/2008; Chicago Tribune, 2/21/2008]

The State Department’s Oil and Energy Working Group, part of the Future of Iraq project, completes its formal policy recommendations for Iraq’s post-Saddam Hussein oil policy. The group comes out in strong favor of an oil policy that would rely on production sharing agreements to manage the relationship between Iraq and oil companies. It states: “Key attractions of production sharing agreements to private oil companies are that although the reserves are owned by the state, accounting procedures permit the companies to book the reserves in their accounts, but, other things being equal, the most important feature from the perspective of private oil companies is that the government take is defined in the terms of the [PSA] and the oil companies are therefore protected under a PSA from future adverse legislation.” The group further specifies that the terms of any PSAs signed with Iraq must be attractive to foreign capital. “PSAs can induce many billions of dollars of foreign direct investment into Iraq, but only with the right terms, conditions, regulatory framework, laws, oil industry structure and perceived attitude to foreign participation.” The Financial Times notes, “Production-sharing deals allow oil companies a favourable profit margin and, unlike royalty schemes, insulate them from losses incurred when the oil price drops. For years, big oil companies have been fighting for such agreements without success in countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.” [US Department of State, 4/2003; Financial Times, 4/7/2003; Muttitt, 2005]

At the request of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Federal Reserve Bank sends the CPA $20 million in $1, $5, and $10 bills. The money is drawn from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) and special US Treasury accounts containing revenues from sales of Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the UN-run oil-for-food program, and frozen assets that belonged to the government of Saddam Hussein. This is the first of several shipments, totaling some $12 billion, that will be made over the next 14 months. [US Congress, 2/6/2007 ]

Roughly 44,000 US troops deployed to Iraq are provided with Vietnam-era Flak jackets instead of the modern Interceptor vests developed during the late 90s and in use since 2001. Flak Jackets do not protect troops from most of the ammunition types being used in Iraq. By contrast, the Interceptor vest—made of layered sheets of Kevlar with pockets in front and back for boron carbide ceramic plates—can stop high-velocity machine-gun bullets, shrapnel and other ordnance. They are also significantly lighter, giving troops more maneuverability when they need to respond quickly to threatening circumstances. Even in cases where troops are provided with the modern vests, they often lack the essential ceramic plates. [New York Daily News, 9/30/2003; Los Angeles Times, 10/2/2003; Associated Press, 10/13/2003; Washington Post, 12/4/2003] Worried for the safety of their sons and daughters in Iraq, parents begin purchasing Interceptor vests and ceramic plates from body armor companies in the US and shipping them directly to their children’s units. Sometimes only the plates are available so soldiers improvise by taping the plates they have received from home to their Flak Jackets with duct tape—a practice that plate manufacturers say is unsafe. [Los Angeles Times, 10/2/2003]

The US Agency for International Development asks BearingPoint, Inc to bid on a sole-sourced contract for “economic governance” work in Iraq. The contract document, which USAID says will eventually be opened up to a select pool of additional companies, was written by Treasury Department officials and reviewed by financial consultants. The confidential 100-page request, titled “Moving The Iraqi Economy From Recovery to Sustainable Growth,” states that the contractor will help support “private sector involvement in strategic sectors, including privatization, asset sales, concessions, leases and management contracts, especially in the oil and supporting industries.” The bid request lays out a plan to, among other things, rapidly replace Iraq’s currency; identify industries for consolidation, liquidation, and privatization; “rationalize” and “modernize” Iraqi banking and financial sectors; develop taxation, legal, and regulatory regimes to compliment a new market-based economy; devise a plan to turn Iraq’s rudimentary stock market into a “world-class exchange” for trading the shares of newly privatized companies; and create a public relations campaign to promote these changes to the public. Summarizing US objectives for the economic reorganization, the document states, “It should be clearly understood that the efforts undertaken will be designed to establish the basic legal framework for a functioning market economy; taking appropriate advantages of the unique opportunity for rapid progress in this area presented by the current configuration of political circumstances.” [Wall Street Journal, 5/1/2003]

Jamal Mustafa Sultan Tikriti, photographed at Chalabi’s ANC headquarters on April 21, 2003. [Source: Reuters / Corbis]New York Times reporter Judith Miller is embedded with Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha (MET Alpha), a US Army unit charged with trying to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Miller had written a number of front-page Times stories before the war, strongly suggesting Iraq was pursuing WMD programs; all those stories will later be proven incorrect (see November 6-8, 2001, September 8, 2002, April 20, 2003, September 18, 2002, and July 25, 2003). Miller plays what the press will later call a “highly unusual role” with the unit. One US official will later claim that she turns the unit into a “rogue operation.” [Washington Post, 6/25/2003]Accepting Military Restrictions - Miller accepted an unusual set of restrictions from the military in order to embed with MET Alpha. Most embedded journalists agreed not to report on forthcoming military tactics and to conceal sensitive information about troop movements and positions. Miller, on the other hand, agreed to allow the military to censor her work, and agreed not to publish items until they were approved by military officials. MET Alpha public affairs officer Eugene Pomeroy, who works closely with her, will later recall the agreement, saying that Miller helped negotiate the terms, and will recall the agreement being so sensitive that Defense Secretary Donal Rumsfeld signed off on it. According to the agreement, Pomeroy will recall: “Any articles going out had to be, well, censored. The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the ‘Secret Squirrels,’ and their ‘sources and methods’ had to be protected and a war was about to start.” Miller’s copy is censored by a colonel, presumably MET Alpha commander Colonel Richard McPhee, who, according to Pomeroy, often reads her work in his sleeping bag, clutching a small flashlight between his teeth. Sometimes, while traveling with the unit, Miller wears a military uniform. [New York Magazine, 5/21/2005]Threats and Connections - Miller, who has the reputation of being a “diva,” is friends with powerful neoconservatives such as Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, and other figures in the Pentagon and the Bush administration. One military officer will later claim Miller sometimes “intimidated” Army soldiers by mentioning her relationship to Rumsfeld or Feith, saying, “Essentially, she threatened them,” to get the unit to do her bidding. Another officer says Miller “was always issuing threats of either going to the New York Times or to the secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat.” This officer adds that MET Alpha “was allowed to bend the rules.” [Washington Post, 6/25/2003; New York Magazine, 5/21/2005] In 2005, reporter Franklin Foer will write: “While Miller might not have intended to march in lockstep with these hawks, she was caught up in an almost irresistible cycle. Because she kept printing the neocon party line, the neocons kept coming to her with huge stories and great quotes, constantly expanding her access.” [New York Magazine, 5/21/2005]Miller Influences Where the Unit Will Go - On April 21, MET Alpha is ordered to withdraw to the southern Iraqi town of Talil, but Miller objects in a handwritten note to two public affairs officers. Her note says: “I see no reason for me to waste time (or MET Alpha, for that matter) in Talil.… Request permission to stay on here with colleagues at the Palestine Hotel till MET Alpha returns or order to return is rescinded. I intend to write about this decision in the [New York] Times to send a successful team back home just as progress on WMD is being made.” Miller challenges the plan to go to Talil, and takes her concerns to Major General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne. Petraeus does not have direct authority over McPhee, the commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which contains the MET Alpha unit. But McPhee rescinds the withdrawal order after Petraeus advises him to do so. [Washington Post, 6/25/2003; New York Magazine, 5/21/2005]Redirecting the Unit's Mission - Miller is also friends with Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi, who gave her leads for many later-debunked stories. More than half a dozen military officers will later claim that Miller acts as a go-between between Chalabi and the unit. On one occasion in April she takes some unit leaders to Chalabi’s headquarters, where the unit takes custody of Jamal Mustafa Sultan Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, number 40 on the US’s most wanted list. She also sits in on his debriefing. None of the members of the unit have any experience in interrogation. Several US military officials will say they are upset that completely untrained officers led the debriefing of Tikriti. One Chalabi aide will explain why they turned Tikriti over to the MET Alpha unit instead of using the ANC’s usual contacts with the US miliary, saying, “We told Judy because we thought it was a good story.” When Miller later writes a story about Tikriti’s capture, she will claim that the handover was pure coincidence, as leaders of the unit “happened to be meeting” with Chalabi to “discuss nonproliferation issues.” One official will later complain that the unit became the “Judith Miller team” when she effectively redirected it from finding WMDs to holding and interrogating high-ranking prisoners. A military officer will later say: “This was totally out of their lane, getting involved with human intelligence.… [Miller] came in with a plan. She was leading them.… She ended up almost hijacking the mission.” A senior staff officer of the 75th Exploitation Task Force will similarly complain, “It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better.” [Washington Post, 6/25/2003]Guarding Her Access - Pomeroy and another witness will recall Miller jealously guarding her access from other reporters. In one instance, when Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman travels with the unit for a day, Miller orders the unit’s troops not to speak to him. According to Pomeroy, “She told people that she had clearance to be there and Bart didn’t.” [New York Magazine, 5/21/2005]Miller Has Unit Investigate Dubious Tips from Chalabi - In other cases, the unit apparently follows leads given to Miller by Chalabi or his aides. For instance, it discovers Iraqi intelligence documents and maps related to Israel, and Miller writes a story about this. Chalabi aide Zaab Sethna will later say: “We thought this was a great story for the New York Times.… That came from us.” While embedded with the unit, Miller writes stories for the Times strongly suggesting the unit has discovered WMDs. For instance, one of her headlines is “US Analysts Link Iraq Labs to Germ Arms,” and another is “US Experts Find Radioactive Material in Iraq.” But like her pre-war stories about WMDs in Iraq, these stories also will be completely discredited. It is unclear how long Miller hijacks the MET Alpha unit for, but the Washington Post will publish an expose about these connections in late June 2003. [Washington Post, 6/25/2003] In late 2003, Miller will say that her reliance on Chalabi’s information is “exaggerated.” [New York Review of Books, 2/26/2004] In 2005, Foer will call Miller one of “Chalabi’s credulous allies” along with a number of Bush administration officials. The Times will not acknowledge the breadth of Chalabi’s influence on the reports it published by Miller until May 2005, but will refuse to connect Chalabi and Miller. Foer will note that although Miller had more access to MET Alpha than any other reporter, “she was the only major reporter on the WMD beat to miss the story so completely.” [New York Magazine, 5/21/2005]A Mouthpiece for the Administration? - In 2004, Miller tells columnist and media expert Michael Massing that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, “my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” Massing will write, “Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities.” [New York Review of Books, 2/26/2004]Admission of Error - In late 2005, Miller will admit that her reporting on Iraqi WMD issues was almost “entirely wrong” (see October 16, 2005).

Iraq’s only internationally sanctioned storage site for nuclear material, known as Location C, is not secured by the invading US force. The site is comprised of three warehouses containing 2,500 barrels of uranium and 150 radioactive isotopes. According to a report by the Baltimore Sun, the Iraqi mobs are “swirling” around the site. Location C is left unguarded until the arrival of Marine combat engineers on April 9. They are sent to the site only after a State Department counterterrorism task force warns Central Command of the potential danger. During the lead-up to war, the Bush administration had expressed concern that Iraq might provide al-Qaeda with uranium to construct a “dirty bomb.” [Baltimore Sun, 4/11/2003]

Author Rajiv Chandrasekaran, holding a copy of his 2006 book, ‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City.’ [Source: Daylife (.com)]Americans who want to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the so-called “Green Zone,” the fenced-off area of Baghdad also called “Little America” and the hub of US governmental and corporate activities, are routed through Jim O’Beirne, a political functionary in the Pentagon whose wife is prominent conservative columnist Kate O’Beirne. Focus on Ideology, Not Experience or Expertise - O’Beirne is less interested in an applicant’s expertise in Middle Eastern affairs or in post-conflict resolution than he is in an applicant’s loyalty to the Bush administration. Some of the questions asked by his staff to applicants: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? According to author Rajiv Chandrasekaran, two applicants were even grilled about their views on abortion and Roe v. Wade (see January 22, 1973). While such questions about political beliefs are technically illegal, O’Beirne uses an obscure provision in federal law to hire most staffers as “temporary political appointees,” thus allowing him and his staff to skirt employment regulations that prohibit such questioning. The few Democrats who are hired are Foreign Service employees or active-duty soldiers, and thus protected from being questioned about their politics. Unskilled Applicants - The applicants chosen by O’Beirne and his staff often lack the most fundamental skills and experience. The applicant chosen to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange is a 24-year old with no experience in finance, but who had submitted an impressively loyalist White House job application (see April 2003 and After). The person brought in to revamp Iraq’s health care system is chosen for his work with a faith-based relief agency (see April 2003 and After). The man chosen to retool Iraq’s police forces is a “hero of 9/11” who completely ignores his main task in favor of taking part in midnight raids on supposed criminal hangouts in and around Baghdad (see May 2003 - July 2003). And the manager of Iraq’s $13 billion budget is the daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator who has no accounting experience, but graduated from a favored evangelical university for home-schooled children. Selection Process - O’Beirne seeks resumes from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks, and Republican activists. He thoroughly weeds out resumes from anyone he deems ideologically suspect, even if those applicants speak Arabic or Farsi, or possess useful postwar rebuilding experience. Frederick Smith, currently the deputy director of the CPA, will later recall O’Beirne pointing to one young man’s resume and pronouncing him “an ideal candidate.” The applicant’s only real qualification is his job working for the Republican Party in Florida during the 2000 presidential recount. Comment by Employee - A CPA employee writes a friend about the recruitment process: “I watched resumes of immensely talented individuals who had sought out CPA to help the country thrown in the trash because their adherence to ‘the president’s vision for Iraq’ (a frequently heard phrase at CPA) was ‘uncertain.’ I saw senior civil servants from agencies like Treasury, Energy… and Commerce denied advisory positions in Baghdad that were instead handed to prominent RNC (Republican National Committee) contributors.” Result: Little Reconstruction, Billions Wasted or Disappeared - In 2006, Chandrasekaran will write: “The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2-year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration’s gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.” Smith will later say: “We didn’t tap—and it should have started from the White House on down—just didn’t tap the right people to do this job. It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings.” The conservative ideologues in the CPA will squander much of the $18 billion in US taxpayer dollars allocated for reconstruction, some on pet projects that suit their conservative agenda but do nothing for Iraqi society, and some never to be traced at all. “Many of the basic tasks Americans struggle to accomplish today in Iraq—training the army, vetting the police, increasing electricity generation—could have been performed far more effectively in 2003 by the CPA,” Chandrasekaran will write. Projects - Instead of helping rebuild Iraq—and perhaps heading off the incipient insurgency—CPA ideologues will spend billions on, among other things, rewriting Iraqi tax law to incorporate the so-called “flat tax,” selling off billions of dollars’ worth of government assets, terminating food ration distribution, and other programs. Life in Green Zone - Most spend almost all of their time “cloistered” in the Green Zone, never interacting with real Iraqi society, where they create what Chandrasekaran later calls “a campaign war room” environment. “Bush-Cheney 2004” stickers, T-shirts, and office desk furnishings are prominently displayed. “I’m not here for the Iraqis,” one staffer tells a reporter. “I’m here for George Bush.” Gordon Robison, then an employee in the Strategic Communications office, will later recall opening a package from his mother containing a book by liberal economist Paul Krugman. The reaction among his colleagues is striking. “It was like I had just unwrapped a radioactive brick,” he will recall. [Washington Post, 9/17/2006]

Jay Hallen, a 24-year old Yale graduate, is bored with his job at a real-estate firm. He is fascinated with the Middle East, and has taken some Arabic classes and read some history books about the region. He contacts Reuben Jeffrey, an adviser to CPA head L. Paul Bremer whom Hallen had met in 2002 when trying to land a job at the White House, and asks if there is a job for him in Baghdad. 'I Don't Have a Finance Background' - Three weeks later, Hallen is in Baghdad, and meets with Thomas Foley, the CPA official in charge of privatizing Iraq’s state-owned enterprises. Foley, a former classmate of President Bush and a major Republican donor, says he is putting Hallen in charge of Baghdad’s stock exchange. Hallen is shocked. “Are you sure?” Hallen asks. “I don’t have a finance background.” No problem, Foley responds. He will be the project manager; his subordinates will do the actual work. Before the invasion, Baghdad’s stock exchange was primitive by American standards; author Rajiv Chandrasekaran will describe it as loud, boisterous, and, despite all appearances, quite functional. After the invasion it was looted to the bare walls and ignored by the first wave of US economic reconstruction specialists. But Iraqi brokers and businessmen want it reopened, so the CPA acquiesces. Revamping the Exchange - Hallen launches an ambitious, if almost entirely ignorant, plan to modernize and upgrade the stock exchange to make it the most technologically sophisticated exchange in the Arab world. He also wants to implement a new securities law that would make the exchange independent of the Finance Ministry. The Iraqi brokers and businessmen who clamored for the exchange to reopen are horrified at Hallen’s plans. “People are broke and bewildered,” broker Talib Tabatabai—a graduate of Florida State’s business department—tells Hallen. “Why do you want to create enemies? Let us open the way we were.” Tabatabai, like other brokers, believes Hallen’s plan is ludicrously grandiose. “It was something so fancy, so great, that it couldn’t be accomplished,” he will later recall. But Hallen is unmoved. Hallen's View - “Their laws and regulations were completely out of step with the modern world,” Hallen will later say. “There was just no transparency in anything. It was more of a place for Saddam and his friends to buy up private companies that they otherwise didn’t have a stake in.” To just reopen the exchange the way it was, Hallen will insist, “would have been irresponsible and short-sighted.” Hallen recruits a team of American volunteers, most with no more experience or knowledge of finance than he has, to rewrite the securities laws, train the brokers, and purchase the necessary computers. By the spring of 2004, CPA head Bremer approves the new laws and appoints nine Iraqis hand-picked by Hallen to become the exchange’s board of governors. No CPA Role - The new exchange board names Tabatabai as its chairman. The new laws have no place for a CPA adviser as a decision-maker; immediately a conflict between Hallen and the board arises. Hallen wants to wait several more months for the new computer system to arrive and be installed; unwilling to wait, Tabatabai and the board members buy dozens of dry-erase boards for the exchange floor, and two days after Hallen’s tour ends, the exchange is open for business. Without CPA oversight, the exchange quickly begins functioning more or less as it did before the invasion. When asked what would have happened had Hallen not been assigned to reopen the exchange, Tabatabai will answer: “We would have opened months earlier. He had grand ideas, but those ideas did not materialize.… Those CPA people reminded me of Lawrence of Arabia.” [Washington Post, 9/17/2006]

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz says that the Bush administration intends for Iraq to become a democracy. “The goal is an Iraq that stands on its own feet and that governs itself in freedom and in unity and with respect for the rights of all its citizens,” he says. “We’d like to get to that goal as quickly as possible.” [60 Minutes II, 4/1/2003]

James Haveman, a 60-year old social worker and the director of a faith-based international relief organization, is recommended by the former Republican governor of Michigan, John Engler, to run Iraq’s health care system. Haveman earned Engler’s approval by running a large Christian adoption agency in Michigan that pushed pregnant women not to have abortions. Engler recommends Haveman to Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense; Haveman is soon dispatched to Baghdad to oversee the rebuilding of Iraq’s health-care system. Replacing the Expert with the 'Loyalist' - Wolfowitz orders the immediate firing of Dr. Frederick Burkle, who worked the issue during the invasion. Unlike Haveman, Burkle has extensive experience in such areas: he has multiple degrees in public health, taught disaster-response issues at Johns Hopkins University, and is currently a deputy assistant administrator for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), who sent him to Baghdad in the days after the invasion. Burkle has extensive experience working in postwar climates such as Kosovo, Somalia, and Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A USAID colleague will call him the “single most talented and experienced post-conflict health specialist working for the United States government.” However, Burkle lacks the Republican political connections. A USAID official tells Burkle that the White House wants a “loyalist” in the job, and Haveman fits the bill. Anti-Smoking Campaigns, Fee-Based Care - Haveman’s tenure is marked by voluble recitations of how well the reconstruction is going: he tells anyone who will listen about how many Iraqi hospitals have reopened and about the pay raises Iraqi doctors have received. He refuses to discuss how decrepit most Iraqi hospitals still are, or the fact that many of Iraq’s best doctors are fleeing the country. Haveman mounts an aggressive anti-smoking campaign (and appoints a closet smoker to head it), ignoring comments that Iraqis have far bigger dangers in their lives than tobacco and recommendations that CPA funds might better be spent trying to combat fatal maladies running rampant through Iraqi populations. Haveman, a conservative ideologue, is offended by the idea that health care in Iraq is free. He institutes a fee-based health care system instead. Most importantly, he allocates almost all of the Health Ministry’s share of US reconstruction funds—some $793 million—to renovating Iraqi maternity hospitals and building community medical clinics. He later explains that his goal is “to shift the mind-set of the Iraqis that you don’t get health care unless you go to a hospital.” Unfortunately, his decision means that no funds are available to reconstruct emergency rooms and operating theaters in Iraqi hospitals, which are being overrun with injuries from insurgent attacks. Privatizing the Drug Supply Distribution Process - Haveman opposes the idea of state-based drug and medical supply distribution on ideological grounds. Instead, he decides to privatize the dysfunctional government firm that imports and distributes drugs and medical supplies to Iraqi hospitals. When he served as Michigan’s director of community health, he dramatically cut the amount of money Michigan spent on prescription drugs for poor citizens by limiting the medications doctors could prescribe to Medicaid patients. He instituted a short list of cheaper drugs that poor patients were limited to using. Haveman decides that the same approach will work in Iraq. Currently, Iraq has around 4,500 drugs on its formulary, and Haveman decides the list is much too long. Any private firm who wants to bid on the job of supplying drugs and medical supplies will not want to deal with such a long list. Haveman also wants to restrict the firm to buying American-made drugs and supplies—no more medicines from Iran, Syria, or Russia. The Pentagon sends Haveman three formulary experts to help him implement his plan, including Lieutenant Commander Theodore Briski, a Navy pharmacist. Haveman’s order, as Briski later recalls, is “Build us a formulary in two weeks and then go home.” Two days into his position, Briski decides that Haveman’s plan is untenable. The existing formulary works well enough, he believes. Haveman wants to redesign “the entire Iraqi pharmaceutical procurement and delivery system, and that was a complete change of scope—on a grand scale.” Most importantly, Briski recalls, Haveman and his advisers “really didn’t know what they were doing.” Others agree, including many on Haveman’s team. Rewriting the formulary is a major distraction, they argue, as is privatizing the pharmaceutical distribution process. Haveman ignores the immediate needs of the populace for his grandiose, ill-considered plans. No Progress - When Haveman leaves Iraq, the hospitals are as decrepit and dysfunctional as they were when he arrived. Baghdad’s largest medical facility, Yarmouk Hospital, lacks basic equipment to monitor blood pressure and heart rate. Operating rooms lack essential surgical tools and sterilizers. Pharmacy shelves are bare. The Health Ministry estimates that of the 900 drugs it deems essential, hospitals lack 40 percent of them. Of the 32 medicines used in combating chronic diseases, 26 are unavailable. Health Minister Aladin Alwan asks the United Nations for help, asks neighboring nations for emergency donations, and throws out Haveman’s idea for a new formulary. “We didn’t need a new formulary,” he later says. “We needed drugs. But the Americans did not understand that.” [Washington Post, 9/17/2006]

General Vincent Brooks briefing reporters, with a photograph of Jessica Lynch displayed in the background. [Source: Reuters / Corbis]Brigadier General Vincent Brooks, at US CENTCOM headquarters in Qatar, shows reporters a video clip of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch (see April 1, 2003), filmed with night-vision lenses. The clip shows Lynch on a stretcher and being rushed to a helicopter. Brooks says that before the raid, the hospital was apparently doubling as a military command post for Iraqi forces. [Washington Post, 4/3/2003] “We were successful in that operation last night and did retrieve Pfc. Jessica Lynch, bringing her away from that location of danger, clearing the building of some of the military activity that was in there.” Brooks says. “There was not a fire-fight inside the building I will tell you, but there were fire-fights outside of the building getting in and getting out. There were no coalition casualties as a result of this and in the destruction that occurred inside of the building, particularly in the basement area where the operations centers had been, we found ammunition, mortars, maps, a terrain model, and other things that make it very clear that it was being used as a military command post. The nature of the operation was a coalition special operation that involved Army Rangers, Air Force pilots and combat controllers, US Marines and Navy Seals. It was a classical joint operation done by some of our nation’s finest warriors, who are dedicated to never leaving a comrade behind.” [Editor & Publisher, 7/14/2008]Reporters Given Video - Within hours, reporters are given a slickly produced five-minute edited version of the video of Lynch’s rescue, edited by a Defense Department production crew. Author and media critic Frank Rich later calls it “an action-packed montage of the guns-blazing Special Operations raid to rescue Lynch, bathed in the iridescent green glow of night-vision photography.” The video vies with a still photo of a barely conscious Lynch lying on a stretcher, with an American flag on her chest, for the most-broadcast image of the day. [Rich, 2006, pp. 80-82] (In a tragic corollary to the video of Lynch’s rescue, the father of James Kiehl, a fellow soldier killed in the March 23 assault, was unable to find his son in the video footage. He will eventually find a shot of his son, dead and laid out behind the hospital, in a picture on the Al Jazeera Web site. The Defense Department videographers had left footage of Kiehl on the cutting room floor.) [Rich, 2006, pp. 80-82; Huffington Post, 3/19/2006]Some Reporters Dubious - CNN’s veteran war correspondent, Tom Mintier, later says, “I was a bit upset that [the Pentagon] spent so much time giving us all the minute-by-minute, this happened, that happened, she said this, we said that… and on a day when you have forces going into Baghdad, it wasn’t part of the briefing. Seems like there is an effort to manage the news in an unmanageable situation. They tried it in the first Gulf War, this time it was supposed to be different.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 80-82]Pentagon's Story Almost Entirely Fictitious - Subsequent interviews with Iraqi hospital staffers and nearby residents show that almost every aspect of the Pentagon’s story is fabrication (see May 4, 2003, May 23, 2003, May 25, 2003, and June 17, 2003).

Still photo from Defense Department video of Lynch’s rescue. [Source: Associated Press]US Special Operations forces rescue captured Private Jessica Lynch from Saddam Hussein Hospital hospital near Nasiriyah (see March 23, 2003). According to the Pentagon, the rescue is a classic Special Forces raid, with US commandos in Black Hawk helicopters blasting their way through Iraqi resistance in and out of the medical compound. [Baltimore Sun, 11/11/2003] The Associated Press’s initial report is quite guarded, saying only that Lynch had been rescued. An Army spokesman “did not know whether Lynch had been wounded or when she might return to the United States.” [Project for Excellence in Journalism, 6/23/2003]'Shooting Going In ... Shooting Going Out' - Subsequent accounts are far more detailed (see April 3, 2003). Military officials say that the rescue was mounted after securing intelligence from CIA operatives. A Special Forces unit of Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and Air Force combat controllers “touched down in blacked-out conditions,” according to the Washington Post. Cover is provided by an AC-130 gunship circling overhead; a reconnaissance aircraft films the events of the rescue. One military official briefed on the operation says: “There was shooting going in, there was some shooting going out. It was not intensive. There was no shooting in the building, but it was hairy, because no one knew what to expect. When they got inside, I don’t think there was any resistance. It was fairly abandoned.” [Washington Post, 4/3/2003] CENTCOM spokesman General Vincent Brooks says he is not yet sure who Lynch’s captors were, but notes: “Clearly the regime had done this. It was regime forces that had been in there. Indications are they were paramilitaries, but we don’t know exactly who. They’d apparently moved most of them out before we arrived to get in, although, as I mentioned, there were buildings outside of the Saddam Hospital, where we received fire—or the assault force received fire—during the night.” [New York Times, 4/2/2003]'Prototype Torture Chamber' - According to a military official, the Special Forces soldiers find what he calls a “prototype” Iraqi torture chamber in the hospital’s basement, equipped with batteries and metal prods. US Marines are patrolling Nasiriyah to engage whatever Iraqi forces may still be in the area. [Washington Post, 4/3/2003]Secretive Intelligence Sources - CENTCOM officials refuse to discuss the intelligence that led them to Lynch and the 11 bodies. One official says, “We may need to use those intelligence sources and collection methods again.” [New York Times, 4/2/2003]Pentagon's Story Almost Entirely Fictitious - Reporters are given a detailed briefing about the rescue, as well as copies of a video of the rescue shot by the soldiers as they performed the mission (see April 1, 2003). Subsequent interviews with Iraqi hospital staffers and nearby residents show that almost every aspect of the Pentagon’s story is fabrication (see May 4, 2003, May 23, 2003, May 25, 2003, and June 17, 2003).

The House and Senate Appropriations Committees both vote to take control of Iraq’s reconstruction away from the Pentagon and give it to the State Department. Both committees vote to give the State Department and other agencies authority over the $2.5 billion in post-invasion aid sought for the Pentagon by the Bush administration. “The secretary of state is the appropriate manager of foreign assistance,” says House committee member James Kolbe (R-AZ). “Bottom line: reconstruction is a civilian role.” [New York Times, 4/2/2003]

Ten days after a Patriot anti-missile battery destroys a British fighter plane (see March 23-April 2, 2003), and eight days after a US pilot is forced to destroy another Patriot battery that targeted his plane (see March 25, 2003), US Navy pilot Lieutenant Nathan White, flying his 14th mission of the war, is killed by Patriot missile fire. White is returning to his aircraft carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk, after a completed mission. [CBS News, 6/27/2004]

Secretary of State Colin Powell says, “I can assure you that we all want to end [the Iraq war] as soon as possible, so we can get on with the task of allowing the Iraqi people to form a new government.” [US Department of State, 4/2/2003]

A barely conscious Lynch lies on a stretcher. An American flag is draped over her chest. This will become one of the iconic photos of the Lynch saga. [Source: Reuters / Corbis]The Washington Post prints a story purporting to detail the trials and tribulations of Private Jessica Lynch, captured in a recent ambush by Iraqi fighters (see March 23, 2003). The Post headline: “She Was Fighting to the Death.” According to the story, Lynch fought valiantly to defend her injured and killed comrades, herself killing several of her attackers and suffering repeated gunshot and stab wounds. [Washington Post, 4/3/2003; Baltimore Sun, 11/11/2003]'Talk about Spunk!' - According to the tale, provided to Post reporters by unnamed US officials, Lynch continued firing until she ran out of ammunition, and even after suffering “multiple gunshot wounds.” An official says: “She was fighting to the death. She did not want to be taken alive.” One military official, senior military spokesman Captain Frank Thorp, tells reporters from the Military Times that Lynch “waged quite a battle prior to her capture. We do have very strong indications that Jessica Lynch was not captured very easily. Reports are that she fired her [M-16 rifle] until she had no more ammunition.” (This is not true, but Thorp will later deny that any deliberate deception occurred—see April 2007 and March 18, 2008.) Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) is fulsome with his praise of Lynch after being briefed by Pentagon officials: “Talk about spunk! She just persevered. It takes that and a tremendous faith that your country is going to come and get you.” Initial reports indicated that she had been stabbed to death at the scene, but those reports were incorrect. Officials warn that “the precise sequence of events is still being determined, and that further information will emerge as Lynch is debriefed.” Pentagon officials say they have heard “rumors” of Lynch’s heroism, but as yet have no confirmation from either Lynch or other survivors. Eleven bodies were found at the hospital during her rescue; at least some of those bodies are believed to be those of US servicemen. Seven soldiers from Lynch’s 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company are still listed as missing in action; five others were captured after the attack. Iraqi broadcasts have shown video footage of the five, along with pictures of at least four US soldiers killed during the attack. Because of debriefing and counseling, it may be some time before Lynch is reunited with her family in West Virginia. [Washington Post, 4/3/2003; US News and World Report, 3/18/2008; Editor & Publisher, 7/14/2008] Other media stories add to the Post’s account. The New York Daily News reports: “Jessica was being tortured. That was the urgent word from an Iraqi man who alerted American troops where to find Pfc. Jessica Lynch—and her injuries seem to bear out the allegation.… Her broken bones are a telltale sign of torture, said Amy Waters Yarsinske, a former Navy intelligence officer and an expert on POW and MIA treatment. ‘It’s awfully hard to break both legs and an arm in a truck accident,’ Yarsinske said.” The Daily News is almost certainly referring to Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief, the Iraqi who told US forces about Lynch being at an Iraqi hospital (see June 17, 2003). The Los Angeles Times reports Lynch was “flown to a US military hospital at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where she was reported to be in stable condition, recovering from injuries said to include broken legs, a broken arm and at least one gunshot wound.” [Project for Excellence in Journalism, 6/23/2003]Discrepancies in Story - An Iraqi pharmacist who was at the hospital during Lynch’s captivity says as far as he knew, Lynch only suffered leg wounds. He recalls her crying about wanting to go home. “She said every time, about wanting to go home,” the pharmacist recalls. “She knew that the American Army and the British were on the other side of the [Euphrates] river in Nasiriyah city.… She said, ‘Maybe this minute the American Army [will] come and get me.’” [Washington Post, 4/3/2003]Story Almost Pure Fiction - According to subsequent investigations by reporters, the Pentagon tale as reported by the Post is almost pure fiction (see May 4, 2003 and June 17, 2003). Author and media critic Frank Rich will later write that at this point in the narrative, “Jessica Lynch herself, unable to speak, was reduced to a mere pawn, an innocent bystander in the production of her own big-budget action-packed biopic.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 82]

The US ambassador to the UN, neoconservative John Bolton, reassures Israeli government officials that after invading Iraq, the US intends to, in author Craig Unger’s words, “take care of Iran, Syria, and North Korea.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 290]

Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz says, “We come as an army of liberation, and we want to see the Iraqis running their own affairs as soon as they can.” [Meet the Press, 4/6/2003]

Overhead photo of Salman Pak, with erroneous captioning. [Source: The Beasley Firm]US forces overrun the Iraqi military training facility at Salman Pak, just south of Baghdad. The facility has been identified by several Iraqi National Congress defectors as a training facility for foreign terrorists, possibly aligned with al-Qaeda (see November 6-8, 2001). [New Yorker, 5/12/2003; Knight Ridder, 11/2/2005] The day of the raid, Brigadier General Vincent Brooks attempts to give the impression that US forces have found evidence that the camp was used to train terrorists, telling reporters that the camp was hit “in response to information that had been gained by coalition forces from some foreign fighters that we encountered from other country, not Iraq, and we believe that this camp had been used to train these foreign fighters in terror tactics…. The nature of the work being done by some of those people that we captured, their inferences to the type of training that they received, all of these things give us the impression that there was terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak.” Brooks says that tanks, armored personnel carriers, buildings used for “command and control and… morale and welfare” were destroyed. “All of that when you roll it together, the reports, where they’re from, why they might be here tell us there’s a linkage between this regime and terrorism and that’s something that we want to break…. There’s no indications of specific organizations that I’m aware of inside of that. We may still find it as with all operations that we conduct into a place, we look for more information after the operation is complete. We’ll pull documents out of it and see what the documents say, if there’s any links or indications. We’ll look and see if there’s any persons that are recovered that may not be Iraqi.” [CNN, 4/6/2003] However, US forces find no evidence whatsoever of any terrorists training activities at the camp. The story had a sensational effect in the media, and helped feed the public impression that the regime of Saddam Hussein was connected in some way with the 9/11 terrorists, but others, from Iraqi spokespersons to former US intelligence officials, asserted before the March 2003 invation that the Salman Pak facility was built, not for training terrorists, but for training Iraqi special forces to combat passenger jet hijackers. The facility formerly housed an old fuselage, generally identified as being from a Boeing 707, used in the training, and has been used in counter-terrorism training since the mid-1980s. A former CIA station chief says the agency assisted the Iraqis in their training: “We were helping our allies everywhere we had a liaison.” The former station chief adds that it is unlikely that the Iraqis, or anyone else, would train for terrorist strikes in an open facility easily spotted by satellite surveillance and human observers. “That’s Hollywood rinky-dink stuff,” he says. “They train in basements. You don’t need a real airplane to practice hijacking. The 9/11 terrorists went to gyms. But to take one back you have to practice on the real thing.” The US forces comb through Salman Pak, and find nothing to indicate that the facility was used for anything except counter-terrorism training. [New Yorker, 5/12/2003; Knight Ridder, 11/2/2005] In 2004, a senior US official will say of the claims about Salman Pak as a terrorist training facility, “We certainly have found nothing to substantiate that.” [Knight Ridder, 3/15/2004] In 2006, the Senate Intelligence Committee will report similar findings (see ISeptember 8, 2006). The CIA doubted reports of Salman Pak being used as a terrorist training camp as early as 2003 (see January 2003). And former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter was debunking those stories in 2002 (see August 2002).

While Saddam Hussein is usually well out of harm’s way from US and coalition forces, hiding at various safe houses in Baghdad while American forces fruitlessly attack possible retreats and hiding places he might currently occupy (see March 20, 2003), he does experience one unsettlingly close call. The CIA receives information that Hussein is in a safe house near a restaurant in Baghdad’s Mansour district; a B-1 bomber drops four 2,000-pound bombs on and around the restaurant. The blast kills 18 civilians, according to Human Rights Watch, but, the Joint Forces Command later notes, “Saddam was not in the targeted area at the time of the attack.” However, early this morning, he is in a safe house less than two miles from the route taken by US troops on their second “Thunder Run” into Baghdad. Hussein will hide for two days, then he and his aides force their way into a private Baghdad residence, where they are able to elude capture by US troops searching the neighborhood. He then flees to Ramadi with his two sons and his personal secretary on April 10. He will eventually go to ground near the town of Hit, where he is eventually captured in the so-called “spider hole” (see December 14, 2003). [New York Times, 3/12/2006]

The Baghdad Museum is evacuated and locked by its curators, who anticipate Baghdad being overrun by American troops within the next few hours. The last three on the grounds are the director, Dr. Jaber Khalil; the director of the State Board of Antiquities, Donny George; and the curator in charge of the museum’s collections, Dr. Nawala al-Mutawalli. They are forced to flee the grounds because Iraqi militiamen have sought cover around the museum, and they fear a firefight. The entire area is under US control by April 9; by April 10, the Army has left the area without posting guards. George pleads for the Army to return to prevent looting, but is ignored. Much of the looting that ravages the museum’s collection takes place on April 12 (see April 13, 2003). The international outcry against the looting is so fierce that the Army will begin posting guards on April 16. [United Press International, 6/23/2003]

Unchecked looting of Iraqi ministries. [Source: Representational Pictures]Widespread looting and general lawlessness breaks out as the security forces of the Baathist regime fade away. Countless age-old treasures are lost when museums are looted (see April 13, 2003). [Associated Press, 4/10/2003; CBC News, 4/11/2003] US officers at Central Command in Qatar tell CBC news it is up to Iraq’s own civil authorities to stop the looting. “At no point do we really see becoming a police force,” says Brigadier General Vincent Brooks. “What we see is taking actions that are necessary to create stability.” [CBC News, 4/12/2003; Washington Post, 8/18/2005] The Coalition Provisional Authority later estimates the cost of the looting at around $12 billion. According to reporter George Packer, the looting canceled out the “projected revenues of Iraq for the first year after the war. The gutted buildings, the lost equipment, the destroyed records, the damaged infrastructure, would continue to haunt almost every aspect of the reconstruction.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 302]

The toppling of the Firdos Square statue (see April 9, 2003) is presented as an iconic moment in history by many US media outlets. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cues the news analysts by saying of the “spontaneously” celebrating Iraqis, “Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.” NBC analyst Tim Russert says shortly afterwards, “Not since the fall of the Berlin Wall have I seen anything quite like this.” CNN’s Bill Hemmer says, “You think about seminal moments in a nation’s history… indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that’s what we’re seeing right now.” David Asman of Fox News tells viewers, “My goose bumps have never been higher than they are right now.” Fox anchor Brit Hume says, “This transcends anything I’ve ever seen.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 83] Al-Jazeera news producer Samir Khader will later say: “The Americans played the media element intelligently.… It was a show. It was a media show.” Al-Jazeera producer Deema Khatib will agree. Referring to various elements shown on American news broadcasts, he will say: “I bet you they brought in those teenage guys who broke the statue, they brought them in with them, because if you notice, they are all sort of the same age, no women, and they all went in and it was the same people on the square. You couldn’t see more people gathering from the houses around. No one came down to the street to see what was happening, because people were scared. And those people who came in, how come one of them had the flag of Iraq before 1991 in his pocket? Has he been waiting there for 10 years with the flag on that square? I don’t think so. But this is not something the US media will talk about.” [Rich, 2006, pp. 84] Most US news outlets dramatically cut back on their war reporting after the fall of the statue (see April 9, 2003).

While the iconic Firdos Square photo op dominates US news broadcasts (see April 9, 2003), the fighting throughout Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq goes almost unreported. CNN’s Paula Zahn makes a passing reference to “total anarchy” in Baghdad; CNN reporter Martin Savidge and CBS reporter Byron Pitts give brief oral reports on the fighting, but no film is shown to American viewers. The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media will later note: “Despite the fact that fighting continued literally blocks from Firdos Square, apparently no camera crews were dispatched to capture those images. According to CNN and FNC [Fox News Channel], in other words, the war ended with the collapse of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square.” After that, the Journal will conclude, “the battlefield itself disappeared”; author and media critic Frank Rich will note that war coverage dropped “precipitously on every network, broadcast and cable alike.” War footage will drop 76 percent on Fox and 73 percent on CNN. [Rich, 2006, pp. 84]

A US military vehicle pulls down a statue of Saddam Hussein in front of a small crowd. [Source: Fox News] (click image to enlarge)The government of Saddam Hussein collapses as US troops take control of Baghdad. To mark the occasion, a statue of the former dictator in downtown Baghdad’s Firdos Square is pulled down, seemingly by a group of average Iraqi citizens and US soldiers. [Associated Press, 4/9/2003] The celebration is later revealed by the Los Angeles Times to be a psychological operation managed by US forces and not Iraqi citizens. [Los Angeles Times, 7/3/2004] The entire event is a carefully staged photo op. The tightly cropped pictures sent out by the Pentagon, and subsequently broadcast and published around the world, show what appears to be a large crowd of celebrating Iraqis. However, aerial photos show that the square is nearly empty except for a small knot of people gathered in front of the statue. The square itself is surrounded by US tanks. And there is some question as to the authenticity of the celebrating Iraqis. Al-Jazeera producer Samir Khader later says that the Americans “brought with them some people—supposedly Iraqis cheering. These people were not Iraqis. I lived in Iraq, I was born there, I was raised there. I can recognize an Iraqi accent.” [Unger, 2007, pp. 302] Fox News anchors assure viewers that images of the toppling statue are sure to persuade the Arab world to see America as a liberator. Correspondent Simon Marks, reporting from Amman, Jordan, reports that “the Arab street” is angry, and it will take careful diplomacy to convince the majority of Arabs that this is not “an American war of occupation.” In response, Fox anchor David Asman, a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer, says, “There’s a certain ridiculousness to that point of view!” [New Yorker, 5/26/2003]

Halliburton is paid $304,486,577 to import 191,965,150 gallons of gasoline into Iraq at an average price of $1.59 per gallon. This does not include the two to seven percent bonus the company will receive as part of its cost-plus contract, which will bring the total cost to between $1.62 and $1.70 per gallon. The Congressional Research Center will later report that during this time the wholesale cost of gas in the Middle East was only 71 cents per gallon, meaning that Halliburton was charging the government 91 to 99 cents for transporting a single gallon of gas to Iraq. Later, an expert interviewed by the staff of Congressman Henry A. Waxman will claim that the gas could have easily been transported into Iraq for 20 to 25 cents per gallon. Another will claim that it could have been done for as little as 10 cents per gallon. [US Congress, 10/15/2003, pp. 3-4 ]

Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, later tells journalist Naomi Klein that when he goes to a nearby US Army base begging the soldiers to help stop the looters who are destroying the factory, they refuse. “I asked one of the officers to send two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the looters. I was crying. The officer said, ‘Sorry, we can’t do anything, we need an order from President Bush.’” [Harper's, 9/24/2004]

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